I am new to Linux but understand the basic concepts. I am quickly finding my way around it.

I have an EeePC 901.

After installing 9.04, the first thing that greets me is an error message telling me that a theme is missing.

The system is quite slow. There is much lag with something as simple as a mouseover on the main Ubuntu area with the options of internet, wine, etc. I've read that going back to 8.04, then 8.10 and then to 9.04 will solve this.

Additionally, a somewhat serious issue is I was using Wine to use firefox to watch shows on abc.com. When I tried to watch it, the colors get all distorted and i have to hard reset, as I can't normally.

The most important thing I need to fix is getting a VPN to have internet at school. I installed Network Manager applet, but it doesn't appear anywhere and I cannot find it. The online tutorials do not help because even through terminal, it says it's installed. I've looked under every category thoroughly and it's nowhere. I've restarted several times.

Can anyone please help me? I'd appreciate it.

Have you looked through the documentation ?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC

Yes, in fact that is what I used to install.

But I'm not seeing anything specifically for the abc player or the strange problem with the colors.

I tried everything I found with the VPN issue, but it states in one of the tutorials to use terminal to install it, if the system still can't see the network manager applet and it states it's installed, even after a reboot (or 10).

Just about every problem I can't find an answer to specifically. Maybe I can't understand it because I'm really new to it, though picking it up once taught. The solutions don't work because one thing will be missing or another will just not work.