  I just figured out that the problem is not me,  it's linux.  It's not a great open source alternative to windows,  It's plain and simple:  evil.  I installed linux (
 AGAIN because it locked me out of my own portable after I changed my password and it made something completely different of it)  on my urlLink Dell Inspiron 5150 ,  not a too shabby machine running on a Intel PIV 3. 0 Ghz with 1024 Mb Ram on board and the nice 60 Gb HD.  Anyway,  I decided to go for Fedora Linux (
 a free alternative to Redhat since i don't see a point in paying money for a " free"  alternative to windows)  The decission came after I was fed up with serveral mandrake issues,  didn't get urlLink Debian too run good on this box and didn't even want to start figuring out how to install urlLink gentoo to this machine without messing up my Windows XP install like the last time where I went for a quick " let's put linux on this machine"
 and ended up recovering my data and reï nstalling everything (  by the way,  thanks dell for that nice 16- bit partition which all just made it worse)  Why Linux ?
 well,  I administer several linux servers and Sun Boxes for our webhosting and believe strongly in the power of linux as a server product,  next to that it's nice to develop on the same kind of machine as which your web application will run AND admministering linux boxes from a linux box works better (  ssh,  X redirection etc)  Anyway,
 so I went for fedora.  The start alone made it all worth while,  Fedora by default starts in a graphical mode except.  it detects my GFX card a an nvidia Geforce 5200.  which is correct,  but sadely the driver included in the install does not want to work with it so i already had to reboot and go for textmode.
 After this,  no real problems,  the install is fast and clean but then.  The X server still didn't work so I had to get myself into a console,  edit the / etc/
X11/ XF86config file and set the GFX card driver to vesa for now,  restart X pusing CTRL+ ALT+ BACKSPACE and of we go in a graphical shell Default detection of my USB mouse AND mousepad on the laptop itself worked fine.  After downloading the Nvidia driver for linux ,
 i just went to edit the / etc/ X11/ XF86config again to get it to stop the X server (  it just keeps turning himself on,  even when you kill -
9 the process,  it starts again Ran the installer,  edit the XF86config file again as the README file of nvidia told me and off I go running a perfect image in 1600X1200 on my lappy,  so far,  again so good.  next on the list,
 i want music while I work so I mounted the correct network drives and fired up XMMS (  Both network driver AS soundcard got detected,  this must be my lucky day)  but whoops,  what's this ?  Fedora decided NOT to cougf up the $
 to be allowed to include an MP3 decoder in their OS.  talking about a lack of features,  by default not being able to play MP3's is like a pub without beer,  I mean,  I've put A LOT of time in ripping my 300 albums into MP3's and now you tell me I can't play them because you guys don't wanna pay a minor license fee ?  Great,
 on the look again and quickly found xmms- mp3 packages,  edited my yum. conf file so It would retrieve from the freshrpms site,  yum install xmms- mp3 ,
 and done right ?  WRONG.  I was enabled to play MP3's now,  i'll give you that,  but at the speed of light,  meaning all of my songs seem to be sung by the smurfs on speed.
 I litterally mean a 3. 40 min.  song was playes in less then 20 secs.  Ok,  I might be into some rap now and then but this beats everything.  This issue was solved "
automatically"  a really cool feature in a linux desktop where sometimes stuff doesn't work,  sometimes stuff does ;  Fine,  got this one on the road,  installed some extra software and tools and called it a day (
 it actually was one)  Next on the Linux List :  Getting my wlan to work.  Although i am still running kernel 2. 2 (  I don't see why I should be geeking myself into recompiling kernels on my dekstop machine all the time,
 I mean honestly,  I know how it works,  I do it on servers but in the end your average Computer user is a john doe that probably wouldn't even be able to complete the Linux setup,  why make him compile kernels,  FIX this so it does it this at least semi- automatic and I am not talking about make oldconfig &
 make menuconfig)  Up until now I didn't find a solution to get My SMC Wlan PCMCIA card to work and frankly i just don't have the time to constantly look for solutions,  JUST so I could do my job on a linux box)  And thus my plee why Linux is Evil.  Sure,  it's great on servers,
 just like Solaris,  HP- UX,  BSD flavors etc,  but on a desktop ?  i comes pretty close to my nightmare,
 taking over 1 day of research and hacking config files/ kernels just to get basic functionality that windows XP gives me after 45 min.  of watching and installation wizard.  Why the hell would a person go trough this all ?  Just so you should not fill out a registration key or cough up $ 300 ?
 Come on.
