My real name is Sam, and I am an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, paralytic who tries to live a meaningful and contributive life through a Laptop that's perched on a special stand that can swivel and pivot over the bed to my fully functioning lower arms..  Pretty cool, huh?...well I think so!.  At any rate, my Bedside Companion is an ASUS G74SX-XT1 with a 500GB HDD, an NVIDIA 560 GP, 16GB of RAM and a few Toshiba 500GB USB HDDs.

I have used Mint quietly for 5 years now (along with a Fedora-based distro) both sharing the hard drive with Big Bully Bill's latest nOS.  And although I have managed to cram the rude and sprawling Windows 7, into a 60GB corner with the help of G-Parted, I find I cannot sever ties with Microbilly because of what may seem like 2 trivial reasons to most Mint-folk, but they are HUGE reasons to me:

 [1]  I use windows EAC to rip CDs that friends bring to me from the public library - most in an utterly wretched state.  And after trying all CD rippers known to me in Linuxdom, none have the Accustream capability to produce an utterly perfect CD from a scarred, skipping, battered, library CD as EAC can.  

[2]  DVD movie decryption/ripping with every available Linux tool from the lowly Handbrake, open source OGM, a highly touted mimic of DVD Shrink and the even higher rated Acid Rip that rely on the library and memcode of Mplayer having to be installed, all have either a) failed to start  b) failed half way though or c) produced some ghastly end result.  Simply none of them have the remarkable capabilities and simplicity of interface as DVDSmith, DVDShrink, DVDFab and 2 others in my ring of bandits that have put me in the position of having never been beaten by any encryption - including the toughest Disney animations.  They all deliver a decrypted version of a DVDs original format - VIDEO_TS. From there I can leave them alone for VLC to play back flawlessly, OR I can use IMGBurn to build and write the perfect ISO 9660 (with a UDF 1.50 under-format) that I can play back through VLC or Linux Dragon Player as well.

So I am here in the Mint Forum formally as a  Member for the 1st time and hope to learn a great deal that my command line ignorance has left me dead-in-the-water about several irksome issues - such as getting a few Linux Distros to share a Common Home partition.

Sincerely,

Sam (...as in Sam I Am....)