Hi Jude, At one time before I installed Fedora, I had a Ubantu installation to my hard disk that booted straight into Gnome with Gnopernicus. That drum beat you hear announces that you've reached the graphical login screen. If you know your root password, I believe that the Ubantu that I had installed doesn't use Root as the default, you can login to it. The person who built my system for me used my first name and then password as the password and advised me to change this to a different name and password once I could log in. If root and password doesn't work as password, try finding out what the default user name and password is. Whatever happened, the drum beat means you're at the login screen.<smile> Beth
