I gave up in the end and knuckled down to some serious tinkering.  Found a spare hard disk and loaded up Ubuntu 6.10 linux onto it to see if I could get my music program functioning again.

After updating the whole system over the internet, a mere 1Gb (!) download and a few hours of tinkering later and it lives again!  Hoorah!  I’m so happy, I’ve got one of the few useful things I’ve ever written up and running again.

Of course nothing is ever that simple round here, that was purely a test… Now I have the fun task of repeating the installation on a headless box with no optical drive attached.  Think I’ll wait until I acquire a more up to date disc with Ubuntu on, don’t fancy that monster download again.

Other than that, I was quite impressed with Ubuntu, still not a fan of the Gnome desktop, I’ve always prefered KDE, but the system itself is a breeze to use.  I could be converted.