Fedora beating me down... any distro suggestions?

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 12:09 -0700, Josh Coffman wrote:
> 
> --- Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 09:11 -0700, Josh Coffman
> > wrote:
> > >  Let me say first, I like Fedora if only for the
> > fact
> > > I've learned a lot getting it working on my
> > laptop.
> > > 
> > >  I'd like a distro that will run well on my hp
> > z5440
> > > laptop, and is easy to update, and makes a good
> > > desktop for non-techies. This weekend I went to
> > > moviefone.com to check previews for some movies
> > and it
> > > wouldn't play any even though I have the mplayer
> > > plugin installed in firefox. I don't mind solving
> > > problems; actually I kinda like it. I just want to
> > do
> > > it all the time.
> > > 
> > >  I'm thinking of Mepis or Ubuntu or OpenSuSe.
> > > Whichever I choose for the laptop may end up going
> > on
> > > the desktop also. Any opinions?
> > ----
> > I think that when it's all said and done, it's hard
> > to do better than
> > fedora for cutting edge support of hardware and
> > software.
> > 
> > That being said, using mplayer with various
> > microsoft/apple/realplayer
> > codecs is likely to be a poor indicator of
> > distribution support since
> > all of them require support for non-gpl software and
> > have to be
> > installed post original install.
> > 
> > You don't say which fedora you are using or
> > where/how you obtained
> > mplayer and the various codecs and stuff that are
> > installed so I
> > personally can't be of much help to your situation.
> > 
> > I do think that it would be a good idea for you to
> > try installing the
> > various distributions and reporting back your
> > impression of each as they
> > would represent your impressions.
> > 
> > Craig
> > 
> 
> I'm using FC4 (via CD from ISO's) for both my hp z5440
> laptop and my AMD XP 1700 based desktop. I believe I
> used make/make install for mplayer on the laptop and
> then found an rpm for the codecs.... haven't messed
> much with it in a few weeks so I don't remember.
> 
> The desktop I definitely used Yum/Yumex to get mplayer
> isnstalled, and I don't think I installed codecs.
> 
> I'm at work, so I'll have to check the codecs on both
> tonight. If that's it, it will probably make me hold
> onto Fedora a little longer.
> 
> Cutting edge soft and hardware support is part of the
> reason I choose Fedora after trying several distros
> and liking the Debian based ones. Hey, I like
> Synaptic; which I do have working on FC4.
> 
> I'll send my Mepis review in another thread; based on
> my first experiences with it.
----
fwiw - I would probably use freshrpms.net for add-ons for FC-4 at this
point. Fedora Extras versions seem to lag too far behind and don't seem
to have the commitment at this point to push things - which seems to be
really helpful on things like mplayer where Microsoft is continually
trying to lock up content with advances in their player software.

http://stentz.freshrpms.net/

or dries

http://dries.ulyssis.org/rpm/

is a listing of the rpms - it does support apt/synaptic as well as yum.

IIRC, they had a number of issues updating the transcode software with
the GCC-4 compiler and I am gathering that they have gotten them mostly
fixed as the list has quieted down on the subject...

http://ayo.freshrpms.net/

and their main page...

http://freshrpms.net/packages/

Of course, if you are building from source, you probably have a clue
what you are doing but dries has his spec files (for building rpms)
available without downloading the source.

The problem with building mplayer is all of the dependencies which also
need to be built and using apt or yum (apt seems pretty much dead on
redhat/fedora systems since it doesn't handle multi-hardware-platform
and the apt4rpm developer has for all purposes abandoned it for his new
thing...smartpm <http://smartpm.org> - which I would recommend using
instead of yum or apt.

Craig