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Message: <blockquote data-quote="azhrei_fje" data-source="post: 4024515" data-attributes="member: 12966">I second the idea of using the Live CD.  It's a great way to test out whether your hardware will work with Linux (Ubuntu, in your case).I teach Linux training classes (mostly system administration, operating system internals, device driver development, and so on).I have an old Compaq Presario R3000 that has some pretty funky hardware, but it recently had Kubuntu 7.10 installed on it by my wife so she could play around with Joomla (a content management system for the web).  It found my Netgear gigabit router (wireless) with no problem -- that was a surprise, because the 6.06 that used to be on that same machine was a bit tricky to set up (it wasn't difficult, but there were a lot of steps involved).  She's been using the 7.10 Kubuntu wirelessly for a couple weeks now and loves it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />After installing the machine, I got a window popup that said the machine had hardware installed that didn't have open source drivers and it prompted me to select which hardware devices I might want to use proprietary drivers with.  I checked the boxes for the nVidia card, the nVidia soft-modem, and the Broadcom wireless card.  It told me I didn't have to reboot, but the wireless didn't work right away, so I rebooted anyway.  It came up perfectly. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I also did a bunch of updates.  They failed at one point and restarting the update manager didn't fix it.  So I ran an update of the update tool (called "adept_updater") and then restarting the update manager worked just fine and it completed successfully.  (There must have been some problem with the update tool itself!  Not a problem for me, but it was confusing at first.)Now that the machine is installed and updated, we both love it.  She can browse files on the XP desktop and access our laser printer and fileserver without any problems.Since she's using Joomla, I showed her how to use Adept Manager to install Apache, MySQL, and PHP.  I did the Joomla install myself, since there were no pre-configured packages available.  Then she did the Joomla configuration herself (the package has a simple step-by-step wizard).We're not using it for a media controller, so I can't answer that part of your question.Nero is available for Linux, so you could always use that to do your DVD work.  I burn data DVDs only and haven't worked with DVD video.  I've been sucking shows off my TiVo and some day I want to create a DVD menu and try burning a regular DVD video, but it's not a high priority for me.  I understand that Kino is a good choice for video editing, but I have no personal experience (yet).I would go for the latest available Live CD first.  There will be an icon on the desktop to perform the installation.  If my wife can do it, so can you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Allow 20 minutes for the install.  My updates took about 20 minutes to download and install once I updated JUST the updater itself.</blockquote>

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