Comments on: Fedora 8 : At This Pace, Linux On The Desktop Is Going Nowhere Fast

By: kemlite frp panels

kemlite frp panels — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:35:18 +0000

I don’t normally comment but I gotta tell regards for the post on this perfect one : D.

By: Yaro

Yaro — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:48:31 +0000

Makes me glad I don’t use Fedora, but Arch, which doesn’t cower about merely POTENTIAL licensing issues.

What are they trying to do, make Fedora crippleware like gNewSense?

By: Kiesor Sose

Kiesor Sose — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:48:02 +0000

IMHO, this is not a problem with a distribution, but the industry as a whole. There are solutions in linux, but it takes some tinkering. I believe, but I couldn’t give you specific references other than to read the wiki about the codec buddy, that codec buddy is intended to be a one stop shop for whomever provides proprietary codecs for linux, it doesn’t violate the GPL, but allows the customer (essentially) to violate the GPL, which is completely legal.

This article is a bit of a flame, but I understand because I get frustrated with simple things about linux too. I would recommend everyone stop thinking in the “software in a box” theory and embrace the OSS basis, especially read the GPL. If anyone is here (using linux) and not using Windows or OS X, it’s probably because you don’t like agreeing to licenses for those things that work really well together, but don’t allow the freedom of ease of distribution of linux.

Either way, Linux has come a long way since slackware and the 1.19 kernel I started out using in the 90′s. There will be a time when everything will just work, but like lightbulbs that burn indefinitely, it’s going to take time for the industry to embrace widgets (as in the factory, not the Arlan Rose widget), and not software, are going to be the future.

By: Marshall Place

Marshall Place — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 02:52:54 +0000

I agree with your points, these things should work out of the box. Its Linux though, you have to expect some tinkering. I believe thats the price you ultimately pay for a free OS and its accompanying software. With a little Googling though I was able to solve all these issues fairly quickly and I am by no means a Linux guru. Ran into some issues dual booting with GRUB and Vista. That was remedied with EasyBCD and installing GRUB on its own boot partition(should have trusted my instinct on that one). Regrettably I didn’t Google the task of dual booting Vista beforehand, so I underwent a rather lengthy task of moving stuff over to other partitions so I wouldn’t lose data. It was so easy with previous Windows versions.

I found the following URL via Google which helped a lot after my dual boot was completed successfully: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f8.html

I should note and I’m not sure if that guide addresses it but the default movie player totem should be uninstalled and replaced with totem-xine if you want Fedora 8 to launch your DVDs and actually work when it attempts to play them. The Livna repositories work with other video players but for some reason not with totem. I wish I knew a way to manually edit the Preferred Applications because Mplayer and VLC are my video players of choice over totem, but at least totem-xine works now. I actually enjoyed getting all the stuff to work regardless of the time it consumed which in my estimation wasn’t much. Yeah so there is work involved. This is true with any OS, updates are needed, with Windows getting your AV up, installing your preferred browser, installing your preferred media player. There is a whole laundry list of tasks that I do when installing any OS and with Linux of course you’re going to have to get your hands a little dirty. I wouldn’t say Linux isn’t ready for the desktop because of these issues, but they definitely are legitimate barriers, especially for this distribution which is otherwise really nice once you get it running in tip top shape.

By: Jiggy

Jiggy — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:33:36 +0000

Check out OpenSuse 10.3 and one click all the codecs you could imagine, even got DVD playback with out running off looking for libdvdcss and the like. Running fine on x64 out of the box.

By: Ben P.

Ben P. — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:31:18 +0000

I used SuSe 10 as my first distro… It had fails like this too. Then I decided that blocking things because they might be proprietary. I thought that the spirit of linux was to Be Free. Of course… I also think Music should be open source.

By: nerdbert

nerdbert — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:45:08 +0000

Thanks for the warning. *ugh* I’ve got RHEL on my laptop and we use it in our compute farms at work but I use Kubuntu at home. I had thought about F8 to maybe consolidate my experiences a bit. Not now.

By: Bob

Bob — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 04:31:54 +0000

Right here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/CodecBuddy

Not officially a developer, but a contributor – my mistake, guess I read wrong, but the difference is not that large IMHO.

I reinstalled Ubuntu on another machine, and while I’m more used to Red Hat’s layout and configuration, I feel more comfortable using Ubuntu for day-to-day work..

I’mm sure this Fluendo thing will be seen as a mistake in a near future…

By: DistRogue

DistRogue — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:01:54 +0000

openSUSE also has… err, _issues_… with codecs (and recommends Fluendo). I had to go without my entire Killswitch Engage collection when I tried out 10.3. 0.o

By: Jack

Jack — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:12:42 +0000

Fedora, like RedHat has always been the average computer users’ nightmare. If Linux is to make it’s way into homes it will be smart, easy distros with ubuntu and gOS that do it.