Most people on this thread do seem to get where I'm coming from. I am looking for a stable enough build, with a large community of support. That may yet still exist with CentOS, so long as I can get it up and running. For those who are questioning if Linux is an appropriate choice for me, as I once explained on the Fedora list (Hi, Phil!), for the last year or so the applications I have been running on Windows are primarily open source. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and others. The only thing keeping me on Windows was Windows itself, and I've never really liked it. So all I'm looking for in a Linux distro is the stability to run the open source software that is already stable in Windows and have native builds for Linux. Surely that's not an unreasonable expectation of Linux? I may have given the impression that I'm really looking for Multimedia. But actually, when I was saying that DVDs didn't work under FC4, I meant data DVDs which contained back up files. I would like to play multimedia, and I was using Xine as an example of an applcation I couldn't get running. But really my aspirations as a home computer user are a little less ambitious. Thank you all for the whirlwind of information. As I see the situation now, I should probably try to stick with CentOS for a bit and see if I can get it configured properly. To that end, I tried going to the "dag" repository but the suggestions for what to copy into my yum.conf file simply didn't work. As in, I put them into the conf file, then tried to isntall Xine, and it just came back saying "nothing to do". Anyway, I copied the text that Tom gave me into my yum.conf file, and ran yum -y update, and eventually ot stopped on some public key error. (4/7): kdelibs-3.3.1-3.11 100% |=========================| 15 MB 00:42 (5/7): freetype-devel-2.1 100% |=========================| 521 kB 00:02 (6/7): freetype-2.1.9-1.2 100% |=========================| 774 kB 00:02 (7/7): xmms-1.2.10-11.1.2 100% |=========================| 2.0 MB 00:06 warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6 public key not available for rsync-2.6.5-1.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm One last note about information and being a newbie. People seem to be debating which information I need and which I don't. As a newbie, let me put it this way: there is no such thing as bad information, it just has to be priorized. Bryan can write the longest posting in the world, and it's fine so long as it goes something like in this order: Here's what to do ro make things just work. Here's how it works. Here's why it works like that. Here's the philosophy behind it's construction. Here's the reasons why the alternate methods don't work. All too often, those who know how things work are more concerned with explaining things from how they understand it that they lose sight that the first prority of any newbie is to just get it working. Someone on this list said it was critical to know what was happening when someone gives you a bunch of text that goes into the yum.conf file. Yes, it's good to know what is happening. But *after* I've copied the text in and made it work. I was glad that someone just said "Here, put this here, and then do this, and see if that works." Dave