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Here's why I'm a bit frustrated at the moment with Ubuntu:

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I think it's a bit short sighted to blame your problems on a Ubuntu when the problem is caused by a non-free application being distributed in binary only form. The blame should be appropriately placed with Skype.

You are quite right, perhaps I should have "blamed" Skype for the lack of appropriate support for a still young (yet surprisingly mature) distro. Keeping in mind it was a bit of a rant as to why (in this particular instance) I prefer(red) SuSE, and also this install of Ubuntu was to revive/choke out the last life of this laptops hard drive, and is not of any real importance, shall we say. I have since installed breezy, and had Skype working within minutes, all appropriate packages downloaded through Synaptic (yay no dpkg!) and so on. I've even changed totem-gstreamer to totem-xine with xine-ui and was able to get the multimedia stuff working quite quickly. I must say, 6 months of obviously hard work has made a huge difference to Ubuntu, and I must congratulate all who develop in and around it.

I wanted to install Skype. Skype is a KDE app, (and it looks ugly in

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Gnome - there are workarounds, but aside from that). It requires libqt3-xxxxxxxx.

Firstly, I was trying to install it from the .deb package distributed on skype.com <http://skype.com> (skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386).

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Luckily, as fulfilling as it is to be a Free software zealot and say it's all Skype's fault there are more pragmatic members of the community who are happy to put time and effort into make non-free software like Skype work seemlessly.

My experience with Hoary was not nearly as pleasant as the one with Breezy. I must say that I much prefer Breezy over Hoary (surprised) and it is so much quicker than SuSE 9.3, but this may be due to the light-weight nature of the distro and the fact that I have bugger all installed on a clean (but slowly dying) hard drive and clean /home partition. To get Skype working nicely on Ubuntu you need to look no further than

the Ubuntu Guide (http://ubuntuguide.org) which links to nicely built .debs for Ubuntu that I've used successfully from Warty -> Hoary and now for Breezy.

See specifically http://ubuntuguide.org/#skype

Correct. Once again - instructions worked fine with Breezy, but not so well with Hoary. After reading the rest of your email and the packages you installed I'm

surprised that your box still works at all!

So was I. In fact, I went so far as to leave the laptop on until I was able to download and burn the Breezy ISO the next morning (after some sleep). In saying that, I did end up having to reboot it, as for some reason it thought the CD-RW drive was busy, and, well, yeah. Believe it or not, the system did boot, apparantely without error; though there were a few complaints that it couldn't talk to locale (unsurprisingly). However, all is well now (until my hard drive and more RAM arrives), at which time it will be a tougher decision than originally anticipated to choose between SuSE 10 and Breezy. It hasn't taken long (or much) to like Ubuntu so far, though as a "full featured" distro, I will probably end up with SuSE. Or I could partition the drive and just have both, sharing a /home partition (with different user-folders) - Ubuntu for lightweight applications (eg when I'm on the tram and need to write down a URL, for example) and SuSE for my Development Stuff or something. -- Regards Mathew Carley HostENZ Data Services A Carley Network Media Ltd. (NZ) Company http://www.hostenz.co.nz mathewc(a)hostenz.co.nz Office Phone (Helsinki): +358 9 2316 3712 Cell Phone (Finland): +358 4 0816 2816 Cell Phone (France): +33 6 1811 9475 Skype: mgcarley The information contained in this electronic mail message and any attachments are confidential to Carley Network Media Ltd and it's subsidiaries, and may contain proprietary information or may be legally privileged. See http://www.cnmltd.net/email/ for our standard email disclaimer. Errors & Omissions Excepted. Prices in this email do not include GST unless stated otherwise.