First my questions, Viewing windows shared folders... What's up with it? So far all my readings on the internet I can only seem to access windows shares by typing the address of the shared windows pc in the browser. If I try Networks/Windows/Workgroups it doesn't work. Volume Control. Only way to get to work is by going into properties of the volume. If you use the volume on keyboard or on desktop Icon nothing happens. Installing Wine, installs fine but when you run wine you can't see or read anything when the program runs. Figured i'd write a little review for ubuntu 8.10. Installation was super easy and fairly quick. It recognized every piece of hardware in my computer which was a Soyo K7VME Socket A motherboard, Athlon XP 2000 cpu, 1 GB PC2700 DDR, nVidia FX 5200 128mb agp, Linksys WMP54G PCI card, NEC DVD burner, and 30 gig maxtor drive. I then set up a wired connection which was a bit confusing so I ended up reverting my router back to DHCP. I'm not quite sure how to set up a static IP yet with this particular distro. Others in the past were easier. Upon configuring it for Internet I it found alternative drivers for the 5200 video & WMP54G so I activated them and rebooted. Both now work great. Runs the enhanced graphics nicely and picks up lots of wifi in range. Again I connected to my wifi with encryption quite easily tho via auto DHCP. Then I tried viewing windows shares which didn't work. After doing some research and only finding that entering the shard windows pc's IP address would work I proceeded to play my mp3s. Upon clicking an mp3 it told me there were no proper codecs and asked if I would like to search for some. It recommended Gstreamer. So far Gstreamer has played most every format i've thrown at it, mp3, wma, avi, etc. Next I proceed to make it more online friendly. I installed flash player which was a breeze followed by java which after finding instructions on line was also quite easy. Hey a Linux computer that plays online games and youtube, streaming videos, music! Now this is much better then the old ones. I noticed an updates popped up in the taskbar so I let it do it's updates like 158mb worth. After it rebooted I checked my workgroup & volume but alas no fix yet. After searching for quite some time for a user friendly Linux I'd have to give Ubuntu 8.10 a thumbs up. Apt-get works quite well, wireless "at least on my card" works very good, and Media Playback a definite Plus. They fix the Samba Windows network connection and sound control issue I think windows will have some competition. Maybe not the same as Mac OS but there definitely a step in the right direction. How many others have Ubuntu 8.10? How do you like it so far? Similar issues? MSI K8N Neo AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.21ghz 1GB DDR 3200 nVidia N6600 256mb video Segate 200 gig sata NEC ND-3500AG DVD R/RW

Seems you have most of the bugs figured out. Good job of searching. Most people get stumped on the terms used in linux, even though they might know the concepts in Windows they don't relate the two ideas. Keyboard might/will require more study on your part, if it will ever even work. Audio tends to be tricky. You don't run wine as such. You use wine to allow you to install some windows applications, or open with wine. Plenty of wine tutorials and docs. See sudo and ifconfig. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

just installed a new power supply in a pc yesterday, that had a wmp54g. The card is a linksys and, I had no trouble connecting to my router using puppy. Puppy identified it as a broadcom, so I suspect that is the chip. larry

Volume Control: Double click on the volume icon near the clock. Open a sound file (whatever,a song). Change the value of each colume. First try Master, if nothing happen, leave it at the the max value. Try headphone, and then PCM. If it works, go to System/Preferences/Sound.In Device Tab, change it from Auto detect to Alsa mixer, then select PCM at the list below. Now take a try. I'm sure it works. - Wine: Take a look at:http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManag... Search the name of the program you want to run. But in most cases, it is unnecessary. Just right click on the program you want to run, then open with "wine windows .. loader". It will be ok.