An order of Ubuntu, and could you MepiSize that 3794

rapskat

My biggest issue with most popular distros these days stem from this very thing. Getting something as simple as MP3's to play. Every time I see threads like this anywhere on the net, I see non-answers like:

"What's so hard about apt-get?" "Just use Yum" "Why are you trying to play MP3's anyways? Use Ogg instead"

blah, blah, blah, blah...

Apt-Get is a nice tool and all, but it's only relevant if your machine is connected to the internet; same for Yum and various other similar tools.

I ran into this issue with Fedora Core 4. I oversee a lab of FC4 machines and we decided that it would be cool to be able to listen to music while we're coding. The lab is isolated from the corporate network, so there is no internet access on these machines. The thought hadn't crossed my mind that mp3 support was non-existant with this distro because our previous flavor of Linux was Mandrake-Mandriva. When I went to play a few mp3's from within Rhythmbox, I found that it couldn't. This jarred my memory regarding Red Hat's stance on mp3's from, what, 2001-2002? We took it for granted that things like this simply worked with Mandrake 9.2-10.1 and Mandriva 2006.

My first wokaround was to install Real Player, after which, Helix Player was no where to be found. This was an ok short-term fix, but no one like it because there was no way to create playlists. After several posts to usenet and various other places, I ended up downloading a bunch of rpms from livna repository and proceeded to install them. Rhythmbox works with mp3's now but, aside from Real Player, no other media apps will.

In 2006, that simply won't do.

At home, I use Mandriva 2006 because it works the way I expect it to. After installig it, I have to do the same things I would with XP: d-l and install Nvidia drivers, Divx and other codecs, Real Player, Netbeans w-Java (extra step: add java to $PATH), Flash plugins, Xmms (under XP, I use Winamp 2.95), transfer Winamp skins from thumb drive, and install Quake3.

I'm also a musician. For the longest I was encoding everything I do in ogg vorbis format. I quickly learned that, although Ogg has superior sound quality, it has such a tiny user base out there that I had to start offering my music as mp3 again just so people would listen.

I understand that there are philisophical reasons for not wanting proprietary apps and whatnot "soiling" a distro, but if you're trying to get peopl to convert to linux from Win32, just suck it up and make the transition a painless one. Some battles are just not worth it.