ummm nice but some issues

My first post, Hi all

I purchased my ZG5 on ebay, got it for £93 not bad. 3 weeks ago. got it to play converted DVD's while on holiday, karati training videos, beter than using a Loox 560 3 inch screen.

Firstly took a fair bit to find a correct codec to play on the stock OS, still managed it.

Then found it has a very anoying fan buzzing, tip it upside down it goes away, so I had a go at getting to the fan, using instuctions on this site, dam I broke F3 key trying to get to the little keyboard clips. still 2 days before I fly so a bit of blu tack and ordered a new keyboard so will be ready when I get back.

So on holiday all is ok did a bit of training, then decided to copy some music to a creative clip MP3 player from a SD card with a USB card reader. All ok, then lost the OS, would only boot up past the acer blue screen then black screen with mouse arrow, noting nada.

Got back decided to put XP on. Took over 3 hrs to load. slow way slow. the SSD HD light is constantly on. the processor is only at 16% and less but its slow compared to the origional OS. I deleted all the partitions and made a 10GB for XP and rest for data. I used nlight and put SP3 and drivers on.

So just put kubuntu-Netbook 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 seems ok, all works except no MP3 or AVI or MPEG or MPEG4 playback. Any ideas of whats the best player. Also MP3 format is this different than windows, or do I need to convert to another format. Other than this the one now seems fast and like the interfaces.

Finally had a look at the fan and looks a bit shabby, so will order a new one and the new key board works fine, except its a US not a UK so no £ and @ and " are changed over, so will install the US keyboard settings next upgrade

 

If you enable the universe repository, you should be able to get all the codecs you need. MP3 is MP3, regardless of the platform you're using for playback. As for the "best" player, that's a matter of personal preference. My Ubuntu installations currently include deadbeef for music and mplayer with the gnome front-end for videos.

 

Thanks for the info. i thought mp3 were standard, it confused me a bit never run linux before.

Installed unbuntu now, hibernates with lid closed and always finds wifi, the 2 issues I found with kubuntu.

After this post both OS automatically download needed codecs. Also downloaded the codec pack from the unbuntu software center.

The fan is driving me mad now, tried to download the fan speed control program but cant save to root and cant get my head round sudo commands yet

 

Syntax: sudo <command> where <command> is the command you want to run as root. Temporarily elevates your privileges, so you have all the permissions that root would have.