I just wanted to thank everyone here who indured my garbage for so long here. I have been using the latest build of Kubuntu (64bit) and have been very happy with the results. On this little crappy 5gig drive I've been able to do quite a bit. Previously I had XP X64 edition on there, and it was able to hold Windows, the updates, and Firefox and was already warning me about only having 600mb left. I've still got quite a ways to go before filling this tiny little drive up.

With this, I have the quite a few things installed. I got over my fear of editing files and just looked at it like editing weapon.dat or handling.cfg in GTA. It was actually fun. I had some upset moments for a while, during the time I tried using the "skills" I had acquired from troubleshooting windows over the years. I have received so much help from this board!

I was actually able to get my hands on a couple of the programs I was looking for through, [gasp], apt-get. I was amazed they were there. Even the Vice C64 emulator was there.

Now it's pretty much just trying to get the big order of a version of Mame similar to Mame32Plus! that handles filters (Andrea's modes, 2xsai, SuperEagle, etc) and has the ability to adjust the emulated games' refresh rate--either built with ICC or built for 64bit processors--otherwise I know of a couple places where I can get the regular mame and get it going, but image tearing sucks and playing a game in a different refresh rate than its native (or what it thinks is its native) sucks too. Maybe somewhere someone was cool enough to share their build with the world....

It's so nice that the locations for programs and their libraries and many other things is actually starting to make sense. It is so radically different than Windows, but so much more logical. The more I use it, the more it reminds me of messing with games. It's cool. After I installed XMMS (with the extra-easy apt-get, something that Windows can't even begin to touch), I was actually able to guess where the files for it were so I could get them to open .pls files automatically through Firefox. I'm starting to realize what I'm really looking at.

Thanks everyone for all the help you have given me. I'm sure I'll have a lot more frustrated questions and other such in the future. Key combinations (like to go in and out of graphical modes and different init levels, quick key shortcuts for common tasks, etc) will be the next thing I'm going to be looking for nice "quick cheat sheets" on the net for.

Another question is--how do I specifically paste selected text across a SELECTED area--like:

I know how the regular copy and paste works using the middle mouse button, but if I wanted to take

"had not taken the bait for the plan to work."

and paste it over

"was not taken sincerely, for he",

how would I do it, or is that not possible? With Windows, I would select what I wanted, hit ctrl-x, highlight the area I want to paste over and hit ctrl-v. Does simply highlighting something automatically put it into the clipboard no matter what? If so, I can live with that, it just means a couple extra steps.

select ctrl+c select ctrl+v

Okay, I guess that does work. Duh.