Kudos, help, and a suggestion :)

[Pierre Far]

I started playing with Ubuntu last Thursday, and for the first time, I feel 
that this attempt at running linux solely might just work out. Great job!

Three things:

1. For some reason, when I try to play some MP3s in Media Player, it tells 
me that /dev/dsp is busy. When I stick in a music CD, the CD Player plays it 
flawlessly.

Also, in this state, when I try to play the same MP3s using XMMS, it just 
hangs and I have to kill it with xkill.... and I can't restart it.

Further, Gaim has now lost its ability to play event sounds, although they 
are enabled for some events (like revceiving messages).

This happened after I enabled starting the sound server in gnome.

So the question is: What's going on? I think what I am trying to do 
essentially is play multiple sounds at the same time and failing. Any help 
would be greatly appreciated.

2. I installed firefox 1.0PR. It is awefully slow. When I hover over a link, 
there is a very annoying delay before the link gets underlined. Opening new 
tabs takes a while, and when I am closing all tabs to leave just the one, 
the last one takes a while to display. It's not a lack-of-hardware problem: 
I have a P4 with over 700MB RAM. Any ideas?

3. A suggestion: Coming from a Windows background, I am used to typing 
"cd.." and not "cd .." (note the space after the 'd'). Of course, bash 
frwons upon this and says the command is not found.

To "fix" this, I edited my bash.rc file and added an alias that maps "cd.." 
to "cd ..". It worked :) Maybe the developers can add this to future 
versions to help in the transition?

Thanks again for a great distro. I am not subscribed to this list, so please 
CC me in the replies.

Pierre