[NBLUG/talk] [WLUG] Mplayer and Fedora 8

[Dave Sisley]

Bob Blick wrote:
> Tell me again, why do people use Fedora? This is actually a serious
> question. Because I know why people use RedHat and CentOS, they want
> "enterprise grade" linux, but Fedora is meant to be a desktop linux.
> What's good about it, especially since there are so many other popular
> desktop distributions?
>
> Cheerful regards,
>
> Bob
>
My reasons are close to Jack's, below.  I started out with Redhat 7.3, I 
believe.  The machines I inherited when I started at Copperfield's were 
all running Redhat 8 or 9, and I've upgraded (most of!) them to 
something more current, but still in the Redhat/Fedora family.  I've 
used RH/Fedora for so long, that I really know its quirks pretty well - 
funny things like 'cat /etc/redhat-release' to figure out what version 
of RH/Fedora you're running.  I know yum much better than apt and I'm 
much more familiar with RPM rather than the Debian packaging system.

I never really learned the 'Debian Way', but I suspect I would pick it 
up pretty quickly at this point in my Linux life.  I have tried Debian, 
SuSE and Slackware (among others) for a short time each, and once I got 
my bearings, they were as good as the others.  

I know that's not a ringing endorsement, but I do actually like it 
pretty well.  I'm using Fedora 8 right now, and it's pretty cool.  I'm 
not taking advantage of the latest Gnome eye-candy, because I usually 
buy cheap machines - see my recent post re: my mobo-soundcard issues (is 
that Fedora 8's fault? or mine?).  Fedora seems to be much more desktop 
oriented than it's server-oriented cousins (RHEL and it's equally nice 
clone, CentOS).

At this stage in the Linux game, however, my sense is that for beginners 
(and veteran Debian users) the choice is probably Ubuntu.  I'm running 
Gutsy on an older Dell box I let the kids use.  It's pretty good too.  I 
was thinking in the back of my mind that my next box should be Ubuntu, 
just to try it out, but the recent storm scrambled my box and I had the 
Fedora 8 disk handy and just had to check it out.  At this point it 
might just be a coke v. pepsi kind of thing.

One thing that I think can go to Ubuntu's favor is the ease of setting 
up Multimedia with non-free packages.  Fedora 8 has decided to make that 
a bigger pain in the ass than it was in FC6.  If you want to get the 
packages easily, you can pay 30 bucks or so (huh?).   If you have mad 
hax0r ski11z like me, you can find them somehow and cram them in there, 
but I was losing faith, there.  That's why I wasn't going to chime in on 
the DVD discussion.  I haven't even gone there yet.

-dave.

-- 
Dave Sisley
dsisley at sonic.net
roth-sisley.net