I installed myself a Linux (Mandrake 8). It has some nice brograms already supplied, but i need *more* So what program do you use on Linux for:

- playing music (xmms looks all right for me)
- watching avis (mostly divx)
- recording cd (is GnomeToaster good? it has some strange command line options )
- and please advice me some other _first need_ progs.
- and some links to some (l)user-friendly linux forums, when someone could help me configur printer and winmodem

I find xmms almost as good as winamp 2.8x, but I still miss some goodies, like adjusting the text size, but especially the plugins are not that good (I miss replaygain for vorbis and musepack, crossfading output, ...)
Edit: I just found out you can change text size in xmms playlist.

For video: mplayer seems to be excellent. I think xine is also popular.

I don't know about forums, but you can learn quite a lot from HOWTOs. But if there are some "user-friendly linux forums", I'd also like to know

I run linux at home, and sometimes at work. I use:
-OpenOffice
-Mozilla
-Evolution (email, calender, contacts, etc)
-XMMS & Xine (go to PLF for plug-ins, etc)
-Audacity (and I hope to run Ardour when it is done)
-CDParanoia (can't decide on a front-end yet)
-TuxRacer (looking for more games like QuakeFordge and Cube)

You may want to buy a book, I have this one and love it, and will be buying this one when it comes out.

Stuffs I use on Linux:

sendmail
apache
php
dhcpd
imapd
mysql
postgresql
cvsd
subversion
iptables
bind
squid
spamassassin
mailscanner
perl
vi
ssh

plus a few more which hasn't come to my mind... oh yes.. hlds (half life dedicated server.. for counterstrike server)

unfortunately, i haven't quite used linux as a desktop yet....

XMMS is good and the new versions have ReplayGain Support for Ogg Vorbis.
If you want something more jukebox alike (ITunes) XTunes is really good program.
mpg321 is an excellent mp3 cmd.line player based on libmad.
cplay (ncurses) is a frontend for various audioplayers

Xine and VLC do the job for video playback (xine uses ffmpeg/libavcodec for plaback); mplayer is a nice program, but I don't like the whole project's attitude...

CDParanoia is a good ripper, my favourite frontend is grip.

dev0

One of the reasons that mplayer is such a nice program is *because* of the project's attitude.

Here is some of the software I have installed on my slow (200 MHz) linux system. Because of the lack of power, I have tried to find the lightest software in each category.

- WindowMaker
Cool window-manager. Fast, feature rich, easy to configure.

- mpg321
An excellent command-line MP3 player with a wide variety frontends (I use wmmp3).

- mplayer
Best video player there is for Linux. Can be a little bit hard to configure though.

- Opera
One of the fastest web browsers there is for Linux.

- AbiWord
A quite light word processor, good if you don't want a whole suite.

- cdparanoia
The best audio-ripper I've come across this far.

Other software worth mentioning is snes9x (fast snes-emulator), scummvm (emulator to play old Lucas Arts adventure-games), xpaint (light, paintbrush-like application) and xbill.

I'm not familiar with the details, can anyone enlighten me?

I use:

WindowMaker, Mozilla, XMMS, Pine, rxvt, Emacs, Vi, Gcc, XChat, cdparanoia, mplayer and oggenc

Bringing this topic back from the dead

Watching video:
Mplayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu
Sometimes also VLC: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Editing video:
Cinelerra: http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3

Listening to music:
Amarok: http://amarok.kde.org/
In console I use Mplayer or MPD: http://www.musicpd.org/

Professional Audio Work
Audio editor: Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and Rezound: http://rezound.sourceforge.net/
Digital Audio Workstation: Ardour, the one and only: http://ardour.org/
Simple playback: Alsaplayer-jack: http://www.alsaplayer.org/
Effects rack: Jack-rack: http://jack-rack.sourceforge.net/ (uses LADSPA plugins)
Guitar amp: Creox: http://zyzstar.kosoru.com/?creox
Communication between audio applications, the glue to tie it all together: JACK Audio Connection Kit: http://jackaudio.org/

I don't have a modified kernel, but tweaking your kernel for ultralow latencies is possible by using realtime patches... I have a latency of about ~2.13ms, which isn't very much, but could be better with realtime patches... I might try it sometime

There are premade tweaked kernels available for at least Red Hat, Fedora Core and Ubuntu. I don't know about others.

Oh, really? I didn't realize. Can you give me a link for Ubuntu 6.06 (to be converted to 6.10 in about 1 month) ? Although it might be better for me to build my own kernel, because I'm also wanting Suspend2 instead of Swsusp (works way better for hibernating my machine)

Ubuntustudio is also coming though. And looks promising. http://www.ubuntustudio.org

I found this page: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=261821 although having read it again it's a little more fiddly than might be hoped.

That said, ease of installation looks to improve dramatically if Mubuntu is released complete with a similar kernel as an .iso; possibly enough for me to switch to it from FC5+Planet CCRMA for audio work - it's something of a pain to have to manually change over repositories every time I reinstall (which with my rudimentary knowlege has been more often than I've liked..!)

Yea, Mubuntu is now called Ubuntustudio
And don't worry, soon realtime patches will become mainstream in the linux kernel

Kubuntu (therefore, KDE), xmms, Opera, xine, JEdit, Apache, PHP, MySQL/Postgres

I'm still mostly a Windows user though :B

I'm largely using Windows too at the minute so I can easily edit Pro Tools files, but since PT LE keeps complaining about my CPU I might spend a couple of weeks getting properly to grips with ardour2. That would ideally mean I don't really have to keep switching between OSes.

From what I'd read I thought Mubuntu was the new name for Ubuntu Studio. I guess these names change too much..!

It's the other way around Mubuntu is now called Ubuntu Studio