hello all, I would second roni's thoughts. ubuntu (or kubuntu for roni *smile *) is much easy to install and gives out of the box "it just works " facility for almost every thing. wifi for example, is absolutely painless. mandriva is as good as another distro and if you are an expoert you can give it a try. but for beginners, and for power users who want easy to use and a system which does not need you to be a hacker, ubuntu and its varients are the best. yes, ubuntu had problem with multi media but not now. in fiesty, just put a movy dvd in your dvd trey and being connected to inter net just see the "jadu". it will take all the codecs it needs and install it and with no tweeking, you get multi media support. the no1 accessibility facility comes with ubuntu and mandriva is far far behind in this matter. and as roni experienced, mandriva will give problems for many things beyond basic hardware. I have tried mandriva on a lot of machines but only a few are running stabilly. my sister for example uses an amd duron and mandriva gave a lot of problems while installing the printer for example. so the moral is that mandriva is no big miracle. just another distro if you like to hack around and do some neet stuff with proper tweeking. regards, Krishnakant.