Hi This is my first post to this list. I have been working with both windows and mac for years as a hobby studio technician with some education in then field. My day-work is teaching music in secondary school and at the teacher trainers college here in Stavanger Norway. However I have converted to Mandrake Linux for my office computer on which I'm at present finishing the first half of my phd on, but I have been reluctant to try it for music. After having read about the agnula project and found Thac's RPM's (http://rpm.nyvalls.se/sound9.1.html) for mandrake plus having heard on the PCDAW(a)yahoogroups.com mailing list that a few people actually do work solemnly on linux for studio work I'm tempted to follow. I'll probably lurk here for some time first, but a few questions: I have installed rosegarden from thac's RPMs and it seems to be working. Looks a lot like Cubase which I know well. The problem is that my trident card (we're now talking about my office box, I have a staudio C-port system on my music box) apparantly is not supported for interal midi in alsa. I don't know if that's the reason, but when I start rosegarden I get the message "sequenzer exited" and then rosegarden starts, but of course with no sound from midi. This is what is in the sequenszer configuration section: " "-malsa_seq". Brahms starts fine, but of course no sound. How would I go about getting softsynths to work? I know Jack is the way. Arts is installed by KDE. Do I have to disable that? Are there any step by step instructions or automated setup programs to fix this for me? And is it possible to use VSTi's under Jack via the vst-server? If it is - how? And what is the simplest jack patchbay program to use? I plan to try rosegarden for composing and Ardour for multitracking eventually. That was quite a few questions. PLease be gentle as I'm not a very linux-literate user. Point and click is sort of my thing, but I love to learn and is quite stubborn.. Hope for some input Best regards Ketil Thorgersen