I just switched over to Linux (Ubuntu) from Windows XP and I'm starting to wonder why. Everything worked well with Windows (no slowdown, no crashing, nothing). I decided to switch to Linux simply because I liked the idea of it being free and I wanted a little more control over my computer. Anyway, to my problems.

Every time I fix one problem, I encounter another. Usually they're really small, but other times they're pretty big.

1) Much more annoying, my computer has been slowing down a lot. It happens mainly if I have a video open, and usually one video will completely stop if I open a second. I can hear my computer's fan get a lot louder in the process. I'm not sure if it's Totem or Firefox. My computer even slows down if I have too many tabs open. It started recently in Linux and never really happened when I used Windows.

2) Every time I shut down Linux or open Thunderbird, my screen goes crazy for a split second (lines across the screen, different colors pop up, etc.). It doesn't seem to affect anything, but it's extremely annoying. Also, when I shut down Linux, I hear a very light pop after the screen stops going crazy which never happened in Windows.

I've been able to fix countless problems before these but they're starting to get annoying. It seems like Linux is more about fixing problems then actually using it. Please tell me this isn't true.

2 and 3 sound like video card/driver issues. what video card does the computer have?

FWIW, my experience with Linux says that often some things don't work first time and you need to tweak and fiddle a bit (and learn in the meantime), but it is satisfying once done and on most hardware you can get Linux to work very nicely indeed.

yes, what are the specs on your computer

What are the specs? Also, on the Gnome Panel go to "System>Administration>Hardware Drivers" and make sure you enabled your graphics card driver.

I enabled the drivers right after I installed Linus (there were three: ATI Accelerated Graphics Card, Broadcom B43 Wireless Driver, and Software Modem).

As for my specs, I'm not exactly sure. I have an AMD Athlon 64 processor (I forgot the exact speed, but it's probably somewhere around 2 gHZ (my computer is about 3 years old) with 1 gig of memory.

It seems a problem if I open any tabs with some kind of video player in them, some worse than others.

After opening gametrailers.com, I could hear my fan start going crazy and, when I tried to open a video in Totem, it was extremely slow.

Using youtube, on the other hand, I opened one tab with a video and it was okay. It wasn't until I opened two or three tabs simultaneously playing video that it started to slow down. That's still a little weird since it wouldn't do that with Windows.

Try some more distros. But if Window$ was stable and you liked it, I don't see why you switched either.

The slow down seems to happen if I even open certain sites that have lots of video on them. Could this be because of a plug-in I have installed.

Also, I'm using Totem, and I looked online and some people were saying it hogs a lot of the CPU power. I'm going to try out MPlayer and see if it does the same thing. Should I uninstall Totem and it's plugins? Could that possibly help?

Also, is there any way to find out which programs are taking up my CPU? Like Ctrl+Alt+Delete in Windows? And I know about the CPU monitor you can add to a panel, but that doesn't tell you which programs are hogging your system.

If they're flash videos this is most likely the problem. Flash still isn't very stable on Linux, so can cause problems. Until Adobe start taking Linux more seriously we'll just have to put up with the problems if we want to use flash-enabled websites.

Yep, Adobe have given us absolute rubbish. Thank you, Adobe.

As for identifying CPU consumption, there are various things you can do. One is System > Admin > System Monitor, the other is opening up a terminal and typing top.

Another new error. I've kind of given up on the slowdown, but as I was switching between different players, I lost the ability to play movies.

/tmp/3.mpg could not be opened, because an unknown error occurred.

Try saving to disk first and then opening the file

When I first got Linux, it just used Totem as the default movie player. I deleted Totem and tried out VLC and Mplayer to know avail. After re-installing Totem and gstreamer, the default player became "Movie Player". The problem is, that apparently isn't a real program, because I keep getting the error above. If I save the file and open it from my desktop, it gives me the option to open with Gstreamer, which opens the file in Totem correctly. But if I try to choose how to open the file straight from the browser, it only gives me the option of "Movie Player" which gives me the error above, and I can't find out how to find gstreamer to open it in gstreamer.

My "preferred application" for video is Totem because it doesn't give me any other option. And I've gone into the preferences for Firefox and all the default applications for media are set to "Movie Player." If I could find out how to set them to Gstreamer, it would probably work, but I can't find the program in the file system. Or is there some way to set "Movie Player" to gstreamer?

If you want gstreamer, consider using mplayer and installing the mplayerplug-in to get it to run video from a browser. You may need to uninstall the totem-plugin first.

Yeah, I had to uninstall all totem related stuff, then installed Mplayer. Works just fine. (Fedora 8)

/tmp/2.mpg could not be opened, because an unknown error occurred.

Try saving to disk first and then opening the file.

I keep getting this error after trying to stream a movie (not in the browser) even after downloading MPlayer. I've completely gotten rid of Totem.

Also, even if I save the movie to my desktop and try to play it with MPlayer, I get the error:

Error Opening/Initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device

I have no idea what that means. What is causing these errors?

You need to change your video driver. For mplayer, right-click and select "Preferences" and select xv or xshm.