installs itself ?
some local components must have run to download and execute the installer !

anyways, it must have installed to your home directory, not globally. (unless you broke the first 2 rules of fight club, and logged in as root )

well as good as installed itself. Yes I did break the rules. Didn't seem to do any harm. That's all I meant though it was as easy as olbob's explaination. Shame more progs didn't follow that lead. I don't mind getting my hands dirty and learning but the majority of people are want something that works all by itself. If linux is to be a serious contender for home pc's then that's the main issue to be addressed and it seems, it can be done. Unfortunately I still have to have win xp installed for dvd authoring, filesharing, and simply listening to cd's. I'm sure as I learn more linux will take over more and more of these tasks until I can finally put windows behind me. (and trust me a beer or two will be cracked open on that day). Meanwhile I will read and read until I am good enough to truly harness the power of the penguin. lol

lol.

when it comes to file shareing....
http://apollon.sourceforge.net
its great, it uses serveral protocols and networks to get greater serach results.
on my setup it uses OpenFT (quite popular open source network)
Gnutella (used by most common P2P file shareing programs)
FastTrack (used by Kazaa)

as for playing cd's god knows why you dont know how to do that, lol.

Linux is not windows.
if you want everything done for you, without having to learn, stay with windows.
if you want an OS that works and doesnt doesnt suffer from adware, re-boots, virii, crashes, updateing constantly... then use linux