I've installed both Linux mint and Ubuntu 9 and neither of them allow me to watch movie files especially avi files. if anyone knows a good linux or how to fix this problem i'd appreciate it.

cheers.

Moving to Linux Help

i suggest the latest mint i think gloria !! thats what i am using and didnt face any problem .. that you mentioned .. download VLC player from mintinstall !! or open console and type

when you install VLC .... it installs all the codecs you need to play most of the audio and video files

Okay so i installed Gloria and its marvelous but for some reason i watch movies on Mplayer and they display but in a little box. i changed the aspect ratio and it did nothing. just made that little box a different shape ha. Full screen made the entire screen black except for the 3 X 10 video playing. does VLC fix this?
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I'm running mint and i had the same problem with a few of the gnome type players i solved it by setting it the way i like it by using SMPlayer, which is just a GUI front end for mplayer, i have never got on with VLC in Linux (it's choppy sometimes)

okay so where can i find that player?

It's in Synaptic

Add/Remove programs>sound & vided> SMPlayer

Its there in 9.04 as i have just booted to a live cd to check

thanks a lot. any other Linux's you recommend?

9.0? of Mint? it only goes to 7. were you referring to Ubuntu? :/ i dont like ubuntu becuase its hard to get vlc on there and i can't use Skype

are you asking for more OS's or software?

I would go for open suse once you get a hand on ubuntu

yea different Linux OS. I've tried Ubuntu...its okay but i just installed OpenSus and didn't find the software i needed and i'm not in the mood to learn to cross over stuff. ha so i'm resulting in just going back to mint. for some reason I like that much more. but i didn't know if there was some other Linux os i haven't tried yet. Thanks!

mint is great for newbies !!
so are dreamlinux,damn small linux,ubuntu,pclinuxos

Gentoo is an experience to get working, you will learn more about how linux functions compiling Gentoo than using (most) any other distro for a year and a half. OpenSUSE is horrible (it's "self upgrade" from 10.3-11.0 caused it to stop functioning completely). Ubuntu is nice because for the most part it just works properly out of the box (gcc finally included in the core distro), and Debian is a solid distro as well. Nothing is easier than apt-get install *whatever*.



Edit: the command to install vlc on ubuntu is 'sudo apt-get install vlc', Skype is 'sudo apt-get install skype'

Thank You all for the assistance. i've narrowed it down to i think i am just a PC user at heart.