I recall some people enquiring about drivers for the Panasonic DVD-RAM
device under NetBSD, well, to quote Slashdot:

Nathan Laredo (the A/V guru from the expo who had 4
MPEG decoders in his machine running simultaneously) wrote
in to say that he's "hacked out" full read/write/rewrite
functionality for the Panasonic LF-D100 series of Panasonic DVD-RAM
drives under Linux, and the diff is available at OPN. He says he's used the
driver to copy three unencrypted DVDs, and that you probably don't want to
use ext2 on the drive (though it can be done "painfully"). 

(OPN is at http://mpeg.openprojects.net/panasonic.html)

Hope this is of some use to someone

Andrew