[Hampshire] Saving an old DVD drive

Thanks for your suggestions about rescuing the old DVD drive..

I did eventually find a solution. Presumably because of the age of the
hardware, Ubuntu was not identifying the drive correctly and although it
was working for all applications that I tried, it didn't work with the
movie player. The solution was to add "all_generic_ide" to the default
entry in the /boot/grub/menu.lst. Movie player works well but VLC is
very slow and jerky.

I will return the PC to it's family tomorrow. They have a shiny new
Vista machine and it will be very interesting to see what use they make
of the Ubuntu system now that it is available as an alternative when a
queue forms.

It is impressive that a seven year old PC can still be useful and run up
to date software. As a windows machine it had no practical use. With
Linux it should last until the hardware gives up.

Roger