With 7.04 Feisty Fawn I'm running into problems burning CDs on my
Plextor PX-716A. It takes a very long time to recognize a blank CD,
sometimes I have to try several CDs before it will work. I have a
Lite-on DVD player which recognizes everything. I had this problem
with 6.06 also. I can buy a Lite-on DVD burner for less then $40 if
Lite-on is more Ubuntu friendly.

I was using Mepis 6.0 and did not have any problems.