video, audio and windows app in linux problem
 

ok i tried going to linux once before, but i have a few problems

what disto do you think will be best for my move? i want to move away from windows. i hear about this smarter computing bit and i dont like it at all, also i want to beable to do pxe. but thats after i can solve these main issues. i can setup another machine to play my windows games, no problem. but i want to learn linux because i feel its the "new thing" i want to have the linux skills. but here are my 3 main problems.

1. my ati card will not do dual monitor, it is a ATI 9600 and when i downloaded the drivers from ati and compiled and installed them x11 wouldnt come up i had to set it back to the standard driver (user error?)

2. my soundstorm audio from my motherboard would not work even after i put in the nvidia software, it would work with analog but it would not do dolby digital. anyway to fix that?

3.i am using napster as a legal way to transfer music, is there anyway to port it to linux? ie wine or crossover office. the big problem is it uses windows media player rights management. i could use vmware. but i was thinking of a more direct way i want to stay away from windows if i can.

any help would be appreciated!

please please do not ask what the best distro is.. it is all covered in the "reviews" section on this site, and amillion other identical threads. you have alerady named yuorself afer one of the most suitable distro's anyway, so i don't tink you need oterh advice for that....

1 - the Xinerama extensions should work fine for Radeon cards, i'd guess it was just bad luck on your last attempt.

2 - not really touched that kinda thing, but i'd suggest that the newer alsa sound servers can cope with what you want without requiring nvidia closed drivers.

3 - general file sharing software? yes there is plenty of clients of every network you could want. i'd recommend gift personally. it's a little complicted but connects to most common networks simultaneously.