***hello, this program (a version of red hat i think)
loaded first time, and mostly works,
but can anyone comment please:

(1) Helix pgm outputs sound ok,
tho when it says i need Real Player for CDs
i click and nothing happens.

(2) the pgm "CD player" finds the files and looks like its
trying to play the CD, but no sound comes out.

(3) for Linuxes (in general), is that sound cable from the
DVdrive to the mobo actually needed ?
(winXP doesnt need it)

(4) an old hp510 parallel with PH3 driver
prints ok off web pages, but not off Evolution mail:
which only causes it to clunk and put out a blank page.

(5) when i installed CentOS, i think i bypassed an option
to load a lot of other software. How to get back to
that option please (it seems to try re-installing instead).

many thanks

I also understand that CentOS is supposed to be a "more polished/easier" version of redhat/fedora

Helix player is, as I understand it, an open source version of real player - though there is a linux version for real player as well - whether it's available for CentOS (as an rpm ?????) of not I don't know, you may be able to use a redhat/fedora rpm instead. Or use one of the other "media player" apps. They all, AFAIK, will play an audio CD if they can see the device.

CD player apps might be looking in the wrong place for the drive i.e. I can put a disc in and hit the button on the front of the drive, it will play, but thats because it's running directly to the sound card. If I want XMMS, Amorak, realplayer, grip, kscd or whatever to play the music, then I have to make sure it's pointing correctly to the device. Some distros manage to pick the correct device up, some not and have to be directed i.e. /dev/cdroms/cdrom0, /dev/cdroms/cdrom1, /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc - these are some of the things I've had to use to make the apps look at the device I use.

Historically, the cdrom/cdrw/dvd/whatever had to be the one that had the audio cable connected to the sound card/device. Windows picks up the sound output via the IDE cable, linux doesn't - well ok, as I understand it, some of the up to date versions of apps like XMMS can if they are set up properly - this I believe is something to do with /dev/dsp and digital signals.

Printers and drivers? Well whenever I've had to configure my printer I've often found that theres a number of drivers available and have had to change then around to get the one that works best - you could try deleting the printer and then running cups to add it with different driver. Thats usually worked for me.

Getting the option back for the software that you think you missed is probably on available via the install process - one of my frequent suggestions is that when you install, you should ensure that you have a seperate /home partition - this means that any customisations, favourites/data/address books etc. aren't lost and you can just re-install or install something different into the / partition.

If you did indeed miss the option for installing something, then surely you should be able to install the packages via the software manager i.e. there must (I would have thought) be a way of telling the software manager not to bother using the disc(s) source(s), but to use a repository/mirror source where I suspect you'd find all the most up to date versions of any packages that you may want to install! (similar to mandriva, SuSE, fedora, etc etc).