In case this is of interest to anyone else. Recently I had upgraded to Kubuntu 14.04. After that I found that Audacity wouldn't open many audio file types like it would before the upgrade. Today I took the deb file from the Kubuntu 13.10 live disc and put them in the desktop folder on this beast. Then I opened a terminal window in my home directory and entered : dpkg -R --install Desktop I then started Audacity and it worked normally. -- "I get my copy of the daily paper, look at the obituaries page, and if I’m not there, I carry on as usual." Patrick Moore