Linux Experience

Hi, I am writing after a long time and of course my life has changed big time. During the last post I was in college and now it's been around 7 months or so since I have been working in an IT company, however the main thing that I am gonna discuss here, is the change of the machine I posses. I had AMD Athlon and now its Dell i5. I wanted it to be Open Source so I installed Fedora. I started with Fedora 8 then 9 and 11 until I had settled with 12.

Previous versions were not compatible with the machine given the latest hardware I had. The distro seemed nice and complete but I was unable to listen to music since media players do not have codecs sufficient enough to play media. Finally I found mplayer that was perfect and since then I had been using it without a problem. It's been playing all the extensions and all the types of media. However it was a command line player and didn't come up with a GUI. Ultimately I got smplayer which was a wrapper over the mplayer. It was just a GUI and used mplayer to play the media behind the scene.
I did many experiments with it but thats for subsequent posts.
Happy Gnuing