i am about to reinstall linux. got suse 9.1 at the moment but i am thinking about suse 10 or other..

the things that interest me (since a am still abit of a noob here it might not be most important ones) are vidi or media players being able to play xvid or avi files. kaffeine on suse 9.1 has problems with this so i am weary of suse 10. also msn has problems in 9.1 so would maybe redhat be better for this sorta thingy?
thir is a nice book for beginners on suse 10 with installations disks for $60 and it looks good and easy to learn from. aldo if media player still hazy problems with codecs and msn (my daughter insists) i could go with other project like redhat, since i am starting from scrach
also i am interested in networking of course but it should be ok with any of these. what program for transferring files betvene pc-s should i use?

ok sorry if i overdid it....ta advance

Some multimedia applications in SUSE 10.0 are still "crippled" to avoid potential legal problems. There are solutions posted on the Internet, but SUSE does not currently provide an install-and-go solution.

In my opinion, Red Hat (the commercial version) is too pricy for most people and Fedora Core (the "free" version) is too "cutting edge" (read: buggy) for most people.

What I typically recommend to someone who is new (I do not know if you would put yourself in this category or not) and not using a laptop or wireless connection is Linspire. They just released an upgrade version (Linspire 5.0 V2), so now would be a good time to investigate it. Most of the multimedia works out of the box, although you have to purchase a DVD player (as you do with Windows) to play movies. They also formally announced an open source version called Freespire, which I recall has been in the works for some time. That is another option. Of course, you will want to read up on it a little more before making a decision. Good luck in any case.