Thanks for advice from all....I did manage to get Linux installed working perfectly! I just need to get the CD player to play at a louder volume! I have a regular cd rom and also a cd writable drive. But in Linux, for some reason I can only play music cd's in the writable drive! If I put a cd in the regular cd and bring up player i get error saying "no media found" or something like that. The regular cd rom does read a cd with photos on it for example. It just wont play music. And the writable drive, when you play music on cd, the volume is extremely LOW.....I tried configuring sound and other options but its too low to use. Any ideas????? Thanks...bob