the device file of an optical burner is supposed to be
/dev/srN, where N is a counting number beginning at 0.
You need read-and-write permission for that file
So what do you get from
ls -l /dev/sr*
The result might look like
brw-rw----+ 1 root disk 11, 0 2015-01-23 07:37 /dev/sr0
Although i am neither root nor in group disk, i can use it.
The "+" says that there are ACL attached. In this case
you may inquire them by
getfacl /dev/sr0
which in my case reports
...
user:thomas:rw-
...
If your desktop user lacks of rw-permission, then your
superuser will have to grant them. For the duration while
your system is running this may be done coarsely by
chmod a+rw /dev/sr0
But for a permanent solution, which survives reboot, you
will have to check the udev configuration. (I love udev
as much as you love Brasero.)
If this theory does not turn out to be true, try as
superuser:
xorriso -devices
If this finds drives like
0 -dev '/dev/sr0' rwrw-- : 'TSSTcorp' 'CDDVDW SH-S203B'
then the superuser should be able to burn a DVD by e.g.
xorriso -outdev /dev/sr0 -blank as_needed \
-for_backup -joliet on \
-map /home/thomas/photos /photos \
-map /home/thomas/movies /movies
xorriso command -map gets as first parameter the path of
a directory or file on hard disk, and as second parameter
the path which it shall get inside the ISO 9660 filesystem
on DVD.
If the command xorriso --devices executed by the desktop user
shows the drive too, then this user should be able to burn too.
Thomas