Well, maybe not games, not many new XP-based games you can play in Linux/Wine... but transcoding/dvd ripping is definitely within Linux's grasp... anyways, which distro should I install which comes CLOSEST to having transcoding and DVD ripping ready to go out of the box?

Thanks!

Short answer would be whichever ones install transcode, mencoder, etc. (that's what google is for ). Isn't linux mint supposedly a multimedia-oriented distro?

You can install codecs, transcoders, etc. on any distro though, usually without a second thought, so it doesn't really matter that much which one you choose. The best advice is probably to pick a distro that you're comfortable with, and then if it doesn't already have transcoding tools included by default, just add them yourself afterward.

Well I notice RedHat 9 is a nightmare to try and install these tools, for some reason. I'm thinking of trying Ubuntu next...

RH9 is really outdated, that's probably why. Ubuntu might be good to try, it has a lot of community support. Linux mint is based on Ubuntu and uses the same repos, so that's why I mentioned it as perhaps being better "out of the box" for multimedia than Ubuntu, since supposedly it's specifically set up to be a "multimedia" distro.

Fedora (what RH kind of "morphed" into) is a little finicky with multimedia. I have that installed on my mom's computer, and it won't even encode a flac to mp3 or ogg with lame for some reason, even though it will do it with ffmpeg on the command line. So I guess just personally I would avoid Fedora/RH distros for multimedia. not that it's impossible or anything, it just seems easier on other distros, especially some of the "smaller" distros that aren't hard core about providing the codecs, etc.

debian is nice for this kind of stuff, you just include the repository from www.debian-multimedia.org and you get everything you need, transcoders, players, video editors, ...

Does Linux Mint let you run your system as root?

I don't do it often, but I just tried Ubuntu and it won't even give me root password for my OWN system. I have to sudo to do anything.

I don't like systems that try to protect me from myself... I log in as non super user anyway...

no-text - 10 chars.

Under ubuntu you can assign root a password if you don't want to sudo