Cdrecord works perfectly without root if you are on Solaris
but Solaris offers a _complete_ fine grained privileges implementation
that Linux is still missing.
see "man privileges"
Before Linux-2.6.8.1, *) you could in theory write CDs/DVDs without root
privileges is you did not care about coasters that are a result of
buffer underruns. With Linux-2.6.8.1 the Linux SCSI kernel interface
has been broken by an inexperienced programmer that claimed to fix
a security problem which has been introduced some time before _without_
breking the kernel interface ;-)
Without root privileges, cdrecord is not able to send all needed SCSI commands
on a recent Linux kernel. The fact that _some_ SCSI commands may still be send
without root provileges and the fact that cdrecord tries to self adopt to the
features of the drive, often confuses novice-programmers like the Debian
package maintainers for cdrecord.....don't believe these inexpecienced people.
*) With early Linux-2.4.x versions this did only work if you did play with
device node permissions and did give up the security of your installation.
Decent kernel implementations would not allow this as it is a security
risk.
Jörg