I'm still in there swinging, but I hab a vad cod and cand dink strait....;-) I tried installing the new firefox, and it went badly. Next I tried to get it working by updating the Java with the sun linux jre. That mucked it up worse. Then I wanted to go back to the original. Even worse, because now neither version recognized any of the media stuff, not flash, not mplayer, not java NADA! OK, I thought, just uninstall the works, then eliminate the new firefox files, and finally reinstall the whole Java, mplayer, totem, etc. So, I opened the add/remove software and removed all the stuff that said Java, and accepted uninstalling all related packages, thinking that when I reinstalled them via the same mechanism, everything would come back. Now nothing at all works in the old version of firefox (except basic HTML and it parses badly, which seems to be a problem for javascript anyway, since it doesn't do well with lines that have been commented out with "#" this is typically a compiler error where the standard parse string has left "#" out of the single char string for parsing). So of course, being an old hacker, I went through all the steps on the sun website, correllated them with Stanton's website and tried to edit my way out of it. I don't think I made it any worse, but I certainly didn't improve the situation. So, having worked on it from 2PM until 6AM this morning, and then beginning again at about 10AM until now, I have been hacking away at it. I have decided to throw in the towel and ask for advice on how to fix my own personal rats nest. I have considered backing up my local directory, all except the ".??*" files and directories, then reformatting and reloading linux from the DVD. But that seems a lot of work to fix what must be quite a bit simpler. My only problems (that I can see anyway) are the multimedia things and firefox. How it, guys, any simple solutions for the mess I am in? Take pity on an old fool noob? Regards, Les H
