I have two internal DVD burners, a NEC and samsung, both work flawlessly in most linux flavours.
I also have IOMEGA (usb) and Plextor (usb+firewire) external burners, they are all found and more or less autoconfigured in k3b on knoppix, Debian and Slackware, OpenSuse and ubuntu they all had some trouble with the firewire but with some tinkering they worked.