Thanks for your suggestions about rescuing the old DVD drive.. I did eventually find a solution. Presumably because of the age of the hardware, Ubuntu was not identifying the drive correctly and although it was working for all applications that I tried, it didn't work with the movie player. The solution was to add "all_generic_ide" to the default entry in the /boot/grub/menu.lst. Movie player works well but VLC is very slow and jerky.
I will return the PC to it's family tomorrow. They have a shiny new Vista machine and it will be very interesting to see what use they make of the Ubuntu system now that it is available as an alternative when a queue forms. It is impressive that a seven year old PC can still be useful and run up to date software. As a windows machine it had no practical use. With Linux it should last until the hardware gives up. Roger -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
