HACKED!

[gilpel at altern.org]

Monday, the 10th, my provider was offline once again. Some repairs were
needed at Bell/Microsoft's CO. So I thought it was time to write a letter
which I had postponed.

Two hours later, the service was back and I did some research. When I came
back to my text, I saw it was blank except for the date and the
recepient's name and address. I closed AbiWord and was asked if I wanted
to save the text. Of course, I... didn't, but most newbies would have:
man, you've got to save whatever is left of that file!

Whatever changes I later made were never saved: the text always came back
to the previous version. I had to finish the text offline.

Thereafter, it's with video that I had problems. At
Radio-Canada/Microsoft, nothing would play. I checked Edit, Prefrences,
Applications in Firefox and the settings were all wrong. I
closed/restarted Firefox, everything was back to normal. But soon, the
list of applications was shortened by half and, for whatever was left, the
usual defaults weren't available to select. I even had Windows Media
Player for playing Windows Media files!

Yesterday, the service was off for close to 24 hours at my ISP: the
equipment at Bell/Microsoft's CO was really antiquated and had to be
changed. That's after they came to repair my line twice in the last 4
months! You can see that Bell/Microsoft really dig that Linux users don't
care about market share: they give top service!

So, I desinstalled/installed the MM applications and, after some playing
around, everything almost "seemed" back to normal... with GNOME-MPlayer
for playing ASF/WM files by default. For ASX, I believe Amarok was still
suggested :) Since it's impossible to see the properties of GNOME-MPlayer
-- a default which looks rather weird, since it's supposed to be only an
interface to MPlayer --,I chose /usr/bin/mplayer, but I'm still asked to
install MPlayer.

Does anybody know the PATH to their default application for ASX files? I
really want to give that Bell/Microsoft service another try ASAP.