My brother was wanting to do some video editing work on files from his HD camcorder. He knew I did some video work in Linux and called to see what I used.

Unfortunately like so many people his brand new computer was an over-the-counter machine with some unsupported hardware, rather than a custom build that would work out of the box. The first problem was his lack of nVidia drivers for the new GTX 220. A Google found that nVidia actually has a beta driver in their FTP site that would work, despite it not being returned by their web interface in searches.

The next problem was his sound not working - A simple fix in the modules.d to set a probe parameter (it was detecting as the wrong card) and it suddenly worked.

Then, this morning he called to brag about playing Tuxracer on his dual screens and how the penguin rode in the middle, bridging both screens.

It went from "reboot to do video editing" to actually having used Linux for a decent number of hours for other things already.