First, Pete, thanks for the good news. Very nice to know. I had ran across several threads elsewhere that were variations on, "Just got a Firepod, when it's up & running with Linux I'll get back with a report." - then, things wnet silent, & I wondered. After what you wrote, I've had to do some reading. Distro choices. Somehow I'd missed the freeBob page on working setups & the Arch/Firepod entry. Arch looks speedy & interesting. From the opinions I read on setting it up though, I'm afraid most of me knows I don't have the kungfu for getting it operational, even if a little piece of me would like to try. But with my Linux skills nearly nonexistant, I'm going to stay off that path for now. My experience with Gentoo was short lived. I tried it in an old box about a year & a half ago. Even though it was reading from the install disc in the cdrom drive, Gentoo implied it couldn't find the drive, had a kernel panic or something, & gave up. Someone said they knew another person who'd run into the same install failure & recomended I go with an earlier release. The same thing. It didn't work either. Then, I gave up too. Perhaps I'll try Gentoo later - & the Pro-Audio Overlay makes it more attractive - but this minute I'm thinking FC 5 & Planet CCRMA. Is it indecent to hope there'll be time to simply work with the audio tools without an exorbidant amount of system tweaking at each step? Are you connecting other audio hardware via JACK with Fedora? A Midi controller of some sort? I have a Midiman 49 Key Station & would like to use it under Linux. With Demudi, nothing would aknowledge it's existence. Thanks, underwater