Accessing remote files fails, etc

[pastim]

I having not having a good time upgrading to 12.10 from 12.04. I am about to give up and spend another 2 days rebuilding my system on 12.04 from scratch, again.

Before I do make that decision, I have a very strange problem I'd like to report.

I have a load of flacs & mp3s on a separate system (a vortexbox). I have installed samba (in the same way as on 12.04) and mounted the remote drive. I can read small text files on that remote system with no problem.

However, if I try to copy a flac or mp3 to my ubuntu system, or play a track direct from that system using, say, Rhythmbox, the process starts and then locks up. The process cannot even be killed.

I did this all the time on 12.04. Nothing has changed on my vortexbox - I can play files on it from a separate laptop. I copied a flac from the vortexbox to my laptop, and tried to play remotely via a share on that laptop. It still didn't play. So it is definitely the ubuntu system that's at fault.

I can download megabytes from the net with no problem, so it doesn't seem to the the network.

Any thoughts out there?

I have also had nightmares with:

- the video (I need nvidia drivers to support unity, which 12.10 says are installed but don't work unless you install some linux source and headers - it took hours to work that out)

- gnome sound button doesn't work (pulse audio vol control does)

- hibernation doesn't work

- reports in libreoffice Base don't work

and I haven't finished trying to set up yet. :frown:

[pastim]

This gets weird. I can play large movies remotely using my ubuntu desktop from the same vortexbox, so it's not the network or file system itself causing problems.

I cannot play mp3s or flacs. I cannot even copy them.

What could possibly cause that? Where would I look for a log?