Legal issues with music

Since I am a little bit bored, I decided to setup a Ubuntu Linux box to play with. I have been hearing all these things about the distro that made me curious. The beauty of Linux is its open sourceness ( not sure if that is even a word). However, it is also because of that feature that it is a pain in the neck.

Ubuntu's installation was pretty straight forward, but I still have some pet peeves about it. First, the latest version of Ubuntu 7.04 did not recognize my mouse and keyboard making it impossible to install. So I had to install a previous version and upgrade to the latest one. Also, the partitioning tool is not very user friendly. Maybe I am just partition challenged or something, but it took me a couple of tries to make head or tails about what it was suppose to do. Finally, I spent a whole day setting up mp3 playback. Now to be fair, the only reason mp3 playback does not come standard with Linux is because of copyright laws. I discovered the use of Automatix. With one click, I was able to install all the required softwares and codecs. Yay for me~ So all in all, it was fun setting it up. But now that it is all up and running, I discovered that it is pretty much the same with any of the other distro I played with previously. There might be some small changes or difference, but in general it is pretty much the same. Maybe it is because I am so used to using the command line instead of the gui. :p or maybe it is because I only use it to surf the web, check my email, watch movies, and listen to music. Maybe I should try using it as a development tool or something.