hello - i purchased a Dell DW316 external DVD/CD burner and i can’t get it installed. i checked to see if anyone who’d purchased it was using it on Linux, and found that people were using it just fine, but i’m not sure how they did it. i tried finding drivers, but that was kind of a mess. what should i do?
thanks in advance 
Most external DVD/CD drives do not require drivers. They are normally automatically configured.
Please tell us exactly the use case and steps being followed that seem to fail.
I have 2 different external drives of that type (one is a BDRW drive) and the only config required is to plug in the usb cable.
I then can use CDs and play audio or access data, as well as DVDs or BDs with data and videos.
ok i think i got ahead of myself here. when i inserted the software cd that came with the burner, it showed me all the files and whatnot and i only saw the .exe files. however, i just put in an audio cd to copy into my media library and it seems to have worked. i apologize for the confusion on my part. it also played the media off the disc without issue, so i guess it’s working just fine without having to do anything extra.
wish it would’ve pulled the metadata for the audio files over, but it’s not that important.
One thing to remember. Most hardware is provided with drivers for windows when needed.
Windows drivers will not work on linux!
Almost nothing is required for use with linux since software used with linux is FOSS and most drivers have already been created and provided with the installation or upgrades.
Pulling the metadata of the audio CD is the responsibility of the tool used. There are several tools to rip the audio. My choice has been k3b for many years though there are several others with varying features.