Well I didn't make seven days without linux. I was helping the gf with something when I noticed that the dual boot grub menu had completely disappeared and I had no choice but to boot into XP anyway. Enter Knoppix Live CD hopefully to save the day. I followed a load of tutuorials/threads trying to get grub up and working but to no avail si forced to copy key data and reinstall.

This was my first linux install using a 6.06 Dapper coverdisc from Linux Format magazine. My big fear was accidentally installing on the Win drive which wasn't fully backed up - there wasn't much chance of this having spent twenty hours at the monitor trying to fix grub I knew the nomenclature of all my drives and partitions off by heart.

The ubuntu install went well. It was then that I realised I hadn't backed-up my various bookmarks and so on. As for the multimedia issues/codecs etc I wasn't sure what you were supposed to do with them anyway- do you just copy them over to a new install and they start working.

There was problems using synaptic so I went for a different distro installing SimplyMepis. First time everything came out too big so I reinstalled (my third install in three four days?)and it looked good. A similar issue with synaptic though - to get it to work I have to ping one of the repos addresses then do apt-get update this renews the list of apps. I had wmv files working on the first mepis install really quickly but still can't get them to work with 2nd install.

Flash works out of the box so I can watch youtube but I don't know what the situation is re Realplayer the only way to watch BBC that I found with ubuntu. (It took me ages before I got realplayer to work and it was great when it finally worked- all that has disappeared thanks to me reinstalling.)

SimplyMepis has an ok look- firefox windows look neat in it but somethings are slow- or at the very least have inconsisent speeds. Get annoyed whatching the icon bounce when konqueror is loading - a fast file manager is pretty important for jumping around for the bits for my main blog. Why is it so slow? Someone talks of increasing your swap partition but mine is just short of 1Gb so surely its not to small. Saying increase your swap and then actually doing it are two different things.

and it looked good. a similar issue with synaptic - to get it to work i have to ping one of the ar