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

Scott Doty scott at ponzo.net
Mon Jan 14 15:02:28 PST 2008


On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 02:16:17PM -0800, Bob Blick wrote:
> > Having said that, I refuse to be baited into a
> 
> Too late, you replied, that counts :) But seriously, I
> am not being religious about this, I want to hear
> about Fedora, where and why they made their choices.
> And I'm sure the list has people who use Fedora along
> with other distros, so they can point out the
> differences.

Oooooh!  I thought your question was rhetorical -- sorry about that, chief!

In my case, I am running Fedora 8 on three systems here at home, plus a
laptop, plus my desktop at work, plus three (personal) servers at work. 
(There is one other server running CentOS, to see how it goes...)

I think most folks use Fedora because it was the natural follow-on to Red Hat
Linux.  If you want advanced drivers and bleeding-edge technology to work
(and have a high probability of it working right out of the box), it's not a
bad distro to try.

For instance, I think it was one of the first distros to have Beryl
available, and the Compiz Fusion stuff now part of Fedora -- I run it on all
my desktops, so I'm not missing any of this "Air-0" nonsense...

(Aero)

Having said that, my brother told me the other day that it seemed to him I
did a lot of "tinkering" with Linux, and he asked, why don't I run Vista?  I
told him that, first off, doing anything non-trivial with Vista is a pain in
the neck, and has probably already been thought out in-depth on Linux.  Not
only that, but "scriptability" is sort of an afterthought with Windoze
systems... along with things like my favorite example:  try running a few
thousand IP aliases on an Ethernet interface in winderz -- as opposed to
setting up entire networks as loopback addresses on Linux, or using the new
networking utility ("ip") to accomplish something similar...

(Okay, "thousands of IP aliases" is a server thing, granted, but I regularly
bring up IP interfaces on different machines, and I'd rather just do it with
"ipconfig" from the command line, rather than point-and-drool...)

Plus, there really are some advantages to using Nautilus on your desktop --
for instance, you get gnome virtual file systems (version 2), which means
you can make a folder that is a link to a remove system via ssh (sftp)...
heck, can Vista even do that?  If not, maybe they'll add that someday -- but
in the meantime, Fedora's desktop does it _today_, and I'd just as soon
stick with a proven leader in innovation...

Happy Monday! :)

 -Scott




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