Stephanos, I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my grandaughter's Sony VIAO PCG-N505VX Notebook (Pentium II, 128MB RAM, 6GB hard drive, sold w/ Win 98 SE) using the alternate desktop CD because there's not enough RAM to install from the Live CD. To my happy amazement, everything worked immediately after the post installation re-boot, including the PCMCIA Netgear wireless card. I needed to do no post installation configuration. Over the last 6 months I've converted all my Web and DBMS servers to Ubuntu from Windows 2003 Server. I'm new to the Linux/Unix world, but I've had no problems with Ubuntu. Web-based support documentation and support from this mail list has been great --- much better than I ever got from Microsoft. Regards, Dick Dowdell <div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 9, 2007 12:09 PM, Stephen Constantinou <<a href="mailto:stephanos@writeme.com">stephanos@writeme.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Dear All After lots of loyalty to Mandrake/Mandriva I have experienced more things not working out of the box as I have happily ungraded from earlier versions. My level of skill is low, though I do know I have learnt a lot since Mandrake 8.5. I know calculate four things that used to be working by default as not working now without user intervention. Even autofs was not working automatically, which means I will have to manually mount unless I use up some tech support to learn to overcome this. I have never managed to get my onboard/soft dial up modem on my laptop working in any version of Linux. I have browsed the website but I cannot find an exhaustive list of applications that you included. Since Mandrva was on a DVD and I am about to burn the ISO I want to check a few things so that I do not have an unrealistic expectation. 1) Can I expect to have openssh installed by default so that all I have to do is start konqueror and enter the ip/username of the other Linux (Mandriva 2007) computer on my network? 2) Can I expect SAMBA to be installed by default with an entry in the menu to start Samba when I want to connect to my Windows PC (which is also the Mandriva 2007 as it dual boots)? 3) Can I expect Openoffice to be installed by default? 4) Does the Ubuntu have any othe VNC tools, not VNC itself. In Mandriva I was using a KDE tool the name of which might be like 5) Do I have to choose between Gnome and KDE or is one the default? 6) Are there any applications for watching DVDs? 7) Do you use CUPS 8) Every version of Mandrake/Mandriva I have ever had displys an error message during boot that slamer (or something similar) could not be found/loaded. This I think relates to the soft modem. Does Ubunto support soft modems? Please say yes! 9) Will my PCMCIA external CDROM be supported? 10) Will USB flash disks/pen disks, floppies and DVD/CD ROMS be supported so that I only have to insert and they will be recognised? Hope to hear from you Thank you Stephen -- ubuntu-users mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users" target="_blank"> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users</a> </blockquote></div>