I run redhat 9 with both gnome and kde, the desktop items are independent but the start menu appears to be universal, i have figured out how to add and remove desktop links, however i am wondering if there is an auto arrange or align to grid function for the desktop, also i want to add and modify start menu items, when i right click an item and choose proporties to rename or change icon i get a "read only file system" error even as root user, and i have found no way to add items, i assume like windows this is a directory structure somewhere that i could change permissions and modify but i may be wrong. any help with this would be appreciated, i consider myself an expert on hardware and windows systems but i am new to linux, so the details of where files are stored and which system files are responsible for what are unknown to me

I have not use GNOME much but I use KDE and it has a menu editor. Cannot recall how to open it ..for the moment..but that wud help you out in doing things...

May be clicking on the task bar wud give u the option of Menu editor...Will find out and let u know!

right clicked on the hat under kde and got a nicely done menu editor, and it turns out that menus are user and desktop independent as well. havent tried for gnome but i will probably abondon gnome as kde has a better feel to it, it also has an align to grid and sort by name function for desktop icons. it would be nice if somebody created a linux file system map with common folders and files and what they are responsible for, heck it would be nice to have it as a help icon on the menu with the core installation of redhat. if i knew which file stored the menu iformation i could copy and paste it so that all users in gnome and kde would have the same menu without having to walk through the hundreds of items four times replacing the ugly default icon that shows up blank on the menu and renaming the shortcuts that are so not descriptive that nobody would know what they do

Just thinking....but..if you get to used to it, you wont complain...

Same is the case with windows, people are so used to its different settings,they dont feel much pain while configuring...

yeah, i will get used to it and as i learn to modify it to fit my needs it will be alot more easy to work with, i have been trained with microsoft since late 80's and have only used linux for about three weeks total if you put all the days together, i do like the fact that with linux the inner workings of the system are not so hidden from the user so that you can modify the os fairly easy. the only thing that bothers me is naming conventions like Kthis Kthat and Kate and aBcDeff etc i like my entries like this "Netscape Browser" or "Hardware Browser" but with the menu editor i have been able to get them all the way i like them and add more of the progs i have installed but got no menu icons (id rather click than type "/usr/bin/vncviewer" i will catch on to it and master it soon enough. there are things i like much better on linux than windows, for instance firefox/redhat is about 5-10 times faster than xp/ie6 and the progs load much faster. however visually there are parts of redhat 9 / kde that look better but there are also parts that look sort of unrefined, as i get better with it i can prolly modify sys images the way i want, oh one more question, how do i play mpeg and divx on linux, i installed divx codec and real player and winamp, but it became apparent theat the linux distributions of these left out mpeg and divx support.