Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX

(I Hate Microsoft), Linux Help!

<< < (2/4) > >>

creedon:

quote:Originally posted by IanC:
...I have to admit that I haven't heard of that, and I haven't ever seriously tried a recent Debian release.

How does it do with multimedia out-of-the-box? One of my main gripes with most Linux distributions is their lack of a comprehensive media player. You have to dig around to find software to install before you can just double-click on a DivX movie, or insert a DVD to play it.

Is there a distro where immeditatley after installation you could double-click on a DivX avi file and have it play sucessfully?
--- End quote ---
I think you're gonna have a hard time doing that with any distro; Linux is hardware-specific, not really plug-n-play if you get my drift.  Once you setup your hardware, it won't give you a blue screen when it's got the rag on, though.

iancom:

quote: I think you're gonna have a hard time doing that with any distro; Linux is hardware-specific, not really plug-n-play if you get my drift. Once you setup your hardware, it won't give you a blue screen when it's got the rag on, though.
--- End quote ---


...but this really is nothing to do with hardware though, is it?

After my RedHat installation, *all* of my hardware, including soundcard, DVD, network, video etc works fine.

It only takes a few minutes (once you know what you need to download and how to install it) to get the open-source software to play all the various video/audio/DVD formats that are natively supported by, say, Windows XP. I don't understand why something like NOATUN (KDE's media player) can't be distributed with support for these out-of-the-box... There may be issues with AVI and DivX being proprietary formats, I don't know; the fact remains it's easy to get Windows to play these formats and not easy to get Linux to do it... and it's things like that which will stop your average computer user from warming to operating systems other than Windows.

[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: IanC ]

Microsoftsuc:
Looking for a good multimedia package is my main goal.  I would also like to find a Linux distribution that runs very specific Windowsuck apps....

So far I haven't tried anything for this.  The only problem is to do this we are looking at the factor of emulation and that causes everything to run much slower(emulating windowsuck inside linux with like virtual pc).

Anyone had any luck with Wine or WinLinux?

Also, Who here hates AOL, I know I sure do.  I personally like trillian messenger instead.

iancom:
I've been quite successful in getting "solitaire" to work under WINE.

However I've yet to find any other Windows-only applications worth the bother to get working in WINE, so no, unfortunately I can't help you there.

It would be most useful if I could just install Windows apps in Linux, but in most cases there's a free alternative that does the job just as well if you're willing to look for it...

I would rather there were native Linux apps available for these sort of things, since it's only a matter of time before M$ change their API's specifically to be incompatible with WINE to defend their monopoly... (remember what they did with Win 3.1 and DR-DOS?).

hoojchoons:
For a comparison among the different Linux distros you could go here. I can't seem to recall another distro which combines ease of use, a good multimedia package, games etc, except for Mandrake, which is a real easy distro for newbies.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page