[CentOS] ISO burning challenge -- pilgrims progress

First the Storix drive works just fine under DSL 4.2.1 on my Libretto.

So the drive is fine, the media is fine.  And cdrecord on DSL reports 
the media to be

Manuf. index: 27
Manufacturee: Prodisc Technology Inc.

I have all of ONE system with Centos 4 on it.  A Trixbox 2.2; I added 
cdrecord and found that I could burn the iso image ONLY by including the 
-force option to get around the "cdrecord: Cannot get disk type" error.

So I moved back to the Centos 5 system.  I had to add the speed=4 (when 
the unit supports speed=8) along with the -force to get it to burn a iso 
image (btw, timeout=100 does nothing.  The failure is in a few seconds, 
adding to the timeout changes nothing).  There are a number of timing 
errors on the Centos 5 system.  Even the Centos 4 system had a SCSI 
error (0x7000).

I did find ONE mention of "cdrecord: Cannot get disk type":

http://crashrecovery.org/oss-dvd/Changelog.html

but that is dated 2/2/06.  One would think it is fixed in Centos 5.....

I have NOT gotten the HP CDRW working yet, that is the one I want to 
leave on the server, as the Storix is my traveling drive.   More work.  
Any pointers gladly taken!

I REALLY want to move my CD processes to Centos.  I want a GUI interface 
and want to rip and burn music CDs as well.....