Reinstall LinDVD

Under my direciton, my girlfriend recently purchased an Insprion 1420n with Ubuntu 7.10 preinstalled.  She's had the laptop for about a month and a half now and she absolutely loves it.  So far she hasn't had any problems and she's getting really comfortable using linux.

One of the things both of us like about the laptop is the DVD playback with LinDVD.  We own a lot of the encrypted DVDs that libdvdcss cannot play, no matter how much tweaking I do to it.  LinDVD has been able to play every single one of these DVDs without any problem.

I plan on upgrading the laptop to Hardy Heron when it is released at the end of the month.  I have many reasons for this, but the main reason is because it will be an LTS release with three years of bug and security updates.  I know I can do an in-place upgrade of the OS with --dist-upgrade after adding the appropriate repositories; however, in the past these upgrades have killed some of my installed programs which I then needed to reinstall.  I am worried that upgrading to Hardy may kill the installation of LinDVD, which we currently do not have any means of reinstallation.

What I want to know is if there is currently any way of installing/reinstalling LinDVD on Dell Ubuntu laptops.  I have done a lot of research, but the only thing that I have found is this post on the Direct2dell blog that states 1) LinDVD is not offered in the Dell Ubuntu ISOs and 2) they will make available a method of reinstalling the software "after the holidays".  Considering the post was made in December, I can only assume that what they meant with the second statment was after the winter holiday season.  As far as I can tell they haven't disclosed any information on how to reinstall the software yet.

Seeing as my girlfriend paid for the software with the cost of the laptop, I am a little miffed that she currently has no software disc or any other method of reinstalling the software.  When she ordered the laptop, I assumed Dell would either provide a disc with the software on it (like they do with Windows PCs), offer the software for download off of their website, or even offer it in their Linux repos.  This doesn't appear to be the case though.

Is there any way we could be shipped a CD with LinDVD on it, or is there some place from which we could download it?

Again, I reiterate I do not want to install libdvdcss.  It is illegal in the US (though I have used it without any legal hassles), but more importantly it does not play most of the DVDs we own.  My girlfriend paid for LinDVD, therefore she should be able to reinstall it whenever she wants.

I appreciate any help given.  The reason we chose Dell was because they have this Linux offering.  Hopefully resolving this issue could help make the offering even better, as I know many people would benefit from it.

Thanks all :smileyhappy:

srjs8812