Why is Fedora a multimedia disaster? - Here is why.
by Valent Turkovic
I install a fresh Fedora7 (test 3) then run web browser and go to
fedora magazine page - from there I download some video ogg files from
it.
Why is it that when I click on the file I can't view the video? Player
just crashes! And the default player is kamboodle! Why is that?!? That
is the worst video player I have seen ever! On any platform!
Opensource or not there is no excuse to put that player as the default
one!
Fedora 7 experience was a bit better than FC6 one - because in FC6
when I tried the same experiment I got an error message that ogg is a
unknown format and system doesn't know how to open it!
Great! And that was an OGG file with 0% proprietary fibers in it :)
How do you expect to get people to use linux as a destop when the MOST
simple multimedia desktop scenario doesn't work!?!
If you can't play "official" video form redhat pages then this is a
serious case of TERRIBLE multimedia desktop usability!
I know about all the great effort that has gone into fedora releases,
and I love it. It is the best linux distro for me, but I know how to
set it up, iron out the quirks that mess up the destop experience and
configure it for optimal work/play flow.
But please, please make it a lot easier on non-geek people so that
they can also use this great stuff called fedora. And belive me there
are people wanting to do so, but they can't because we don't let them.
They need some features to be enabled by default or else they won't
know how that they even exist.
So please change the default video player to totem or something else,
just NOT kamboodle because it just doesn't work and it sucks GUI vise.
Regarding proprietary video codecs RedHad developers just say
something like this: "We talked with out lawyers and they said no."
Ok? And? Where can we see this discussion? I know that you can't put
MP3 support in fedora, but that you can't even put an link for some
European server that has all the codecs? Lawyers say that RedHat can
be sued even for puting links that enable multimedia. Ok, maybe I
believe it but it is maybe possible that some one would sue, but
hardly win that case.
But there are legal ways around that, you can put a text saying that
it is legal to enable multimedia codecs only if you live in a country
that doesn't have software patents - like I do.
It is possible if you want it - Ubuntu has shown that because they
will be doing just that, and even a step beyond that. Ubuntu will have
a Ubuntu for European market and other countries that don't have
software patents (my country doesn't!) with all multimedia codecs
embedded within the distro!
So please let's start the discussion because believe me there is a
great need for this because there are lot's media files that are
every where (internet, youtube, divx rips of dvds, etc...) that people
have a need to watch and listen.
Hope to hear from Fedora/RedHat developers and Desktop usability
experts what are their opinions.
I will make this email available also on my blog:
http://kernelreloaded.blog385.com/
so you can leave/read comments there also.
Valent
- fiber optics and networking engineer from Croatia.
--
http://kernelreloaded.blog385.com/
linux, blog, anime, spirituality, windsurf, wireless
registered as user #367004 with the Linux Counter, http://counter.li.org.
ICQ: 2125241
Skype: valent.turkovic
17 years, 1 month
running Fedora on a Mac Intel
by Claude Jones
Subject says it all - I'm asking for a friend. Can it be done? Does it work
well? Pointers to sites welcomed - I'm already searching but, good leads
appreciated. If anyone has other distros they think would be better, I'd be
glad to hear about that, too.
--
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA
17 years, 1 month
beagle - turning off
by Genes MailLists
Can someone tell me the preferred way to turn off beagle? A bunch of things
seem to run out of /etc/cron.daily/beagle-crawl-system. Nothing shows up
in /etc/init.d and chkconfig.
It seems to suck the life out of my laptop if it has not been turned on
overnight.
I could remove it - Can one simply "yum erase beagle" - I note rpm's for
libbeagle, beagle-evolution, beagle-gui and libbeagle-python which I am happy
to remove as well as long as this does not trigger a cascade and end up
removing kde or other things I do use.
Thx,
17 years, 1 month
Re: name completion in terminal?
by David G. Miller (aka DaveAtFraud)
Cameron Simpson <cs(a)zip.com.au> wrote:
> On 28Apr2007 22:24, David G. Miller <dave(a)davenjudy.org> wrote:
> | Peter Gordon <peter(a)thecodergeek.com> wrote:
> | >On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 22:07 -0400, Michael Klinosky wrote:
> | >>> Does Fedora have file/directory name completion (when using a terminal)?
> | >
> | >Yes, install the 'bash-completion' package then restart your terminal
> | >(or open a new one) and then you can use the Tab key to automagically
> | >complete commands, filenames and directories. Some commands even have
> | >associated completion-capable switches, too; but that's dependent on the
> | >program's packaging.
> | >
> | >Hope that helps.
> | Unless you use c-shell instead of bash (one of my dirty little
> | secrets). File completion is built into the c-shell but you have to
> | turn it on with "set filec".
>
> Actually, it's built into tcsh. Csh predated the patches that
> constituted tcsh (tcsh is just csh with the interaction patches,
> including the file completion stuff).
>
> | Alas, no command switch completion
> | though. No idea on korn shell, zsh, etc. if you're running one of those.
>
> Bash and zsh do file completion out of the box. I somewhat prefer zsh's
> style myself.
Thanks. I started using c-shell in about 1988 when the alternatives
were sh (note, not bash) and ksh. I couldn't remember whether it did
file completion then or not. I switched to tcsh probably in the mid
1990s when I was doing a lot of shell programming and started running
into the limitation of csh of that era. Now that bash has the features
that tcsh had back when I should probably switch but I still like the
logic control syntax of tcsh over bash for scripting (e.g., endif
instead of fi).
Cheers,
Dave
--
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce
17 years, 1 month
FC6 grub problem...
by Darren Foster
So heres what I did and what consequently happened…
I have been running Fedora Core 6 on my new dell machine for about 4 Months
now happily. I had an old hard drive with windows xp pro on that I wanted to
add to my machine and have a dual booting system. I assumed grub would pick
this up and allow me to select which operating system I wanted to use.
Anyway here are the disks
Sata – windows xp pro
IDE ( with IDE to Sata converter plugged in) – Fedora Core 6 < This has
been working really well up until today.
When I plug them both in together the system boots directly into Windows.
Swapped the sata plugs on the mother board to try and get the Fedora to boot
first and all I get is this….
GNU Grub Version 0.97
Minimal Bash
GRUB>
No I have been looking on the internet on how to get this back and the
following does not work for me.
Root (hd0,0)
Setup (hd0)
Quit
I tended to get error 15 a lot
Any combination of locations in the HD brackets don’t work. I have looked
up the boot sector using Knoppix and that still doesn’t work.
Any ideas please before I pull what little hair I have left out….
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.6.2/779 - Release Date: 28/04/2007
15:32
17 years, 1 month
Re: SMART errors - are they for real? or, BIOS weirdness?
by Paulo Cavalcanti
> The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:
> Device: /dev/hdb, 2 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
> For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).
> You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
> No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.
Unfortunately, these errors are for real.
They mean that you have two sectors (512 bytes each) that cannot
be read anymore. In the next attempt to write them, they will be reallocated
to another area on the disk, and the error will disappear.
This is done by the disk hardware, and have nothing to do with the BIOS.
I have one Seagate IDE disk that started to give me these messages. The
first time I checked, there
were 23 reallocated sectors. Today, more than 350. It is a thing that can
stop, after reallocating
a few sectors, or not, as in my case. As a consequence, the disk becomes
considerably slower.
If you use smartctl on a health disk, the number of reallocated sectors must
be ZERO.
If you see more than a few, do not trust the disk anymore. The makers say
that more than
one bad sector per year of use is a bad sign. On the other hand, I also have
other disks with 5 or 6 bad sectors
and they have been working 24/7 for years.
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED
WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 115 094 006 Pre-fail
Always - 92645708
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 096 096 000 Pre-fail
Always - 0
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age
Always - 43
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail
Always - 0
<---------------------------------------------------
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 070 060 030 Pre-fail
Always - 10622981
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
Always - 472
--
Paulo Roma Cavalcanti
LCG - UFRJ
17 years, 1 month
logger for cron job
by Thufir
I want to have output to know whether or not this cronjob tries to
run, and, if so, what the result is. This is done through the logger?
<http://code.google.com/p/feed-on-feeds/> itself seems to run fine,
but I have to manually update the feeds.
[root@localhost ~]#
[root@localhost ~]# cat /etc/cron.hourly/feeds-on-feeds
50 * * * * /usr/local/bin/GET http://minutillo.com/steve/fof/update-quiet.php
[root@localhost ~]#
[root@localhost ~]# date
Tue Apr 24 22:52:00 BST 2007
[root@localhost ~]#
thanks,
Thufir
17 years, 1 month
Convert PDF to Text?
by Keith G. Robertson-Turner
I have some PDF documents that are photocopied text documents (embedded
image, rather than text glyphs). When I open these with Evince, I am
able to copy and paste the actual text. At first I though this was some
kind of OCR process, but then I realised it's actually the document
itself, which has the original text embedded in it (OCRed and embedded
during the original scan).
Is there any command I can use to extract the text from these PDF
documents in a batch? I have a couple of thousand documents that need
converting.
Just curious, since if Evince can obviously do it (manually) then the
necessary library components (at least) must be installed (FC6).
TIA.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| I found [Vista] to be a dangerously unstable operating system,
| which has caused me to lose data ... unfortunately this product
| is unfit for any user. - [H]ardOCP, <http://tinyurl.com/3bpfs2>
`----
Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.20-1.2312.fc5
22:29:39 up 4 days, 20:01, 3 users, load average: 0.53, 0.48, 0.48
17 years, 1 month
Re: name completion in terminal?
by David G. Miller (aka DaveAtFraud)
Peter Gordon <peter(a)thecodergeek.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 22:07 -0400, Michael Klinosky wrote:
>> > Does Fedora have file/directory name completion (when using a terminal)?
>>
>
> Yes, install the 'bash-completion' package then restart your terminal
> (or open a new one) and then you can use the Tab key to automagically
> complete commands, filenames and directories. Some commands even have
> associated completion-capable switches, too; but that's dependent on the
> program's packaging.
>
> Hope that helps.
Unless you use c-shell instead of bash (one of my dirty little
secrets). File completion is built into the c-shell but you have to
turn it on with "set filec". Alas, no command switch completion
though. No idea on korn shell, zsh, etc. if you're running one of those.
Cheers,
Dave
--
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce
17 years, 1 month
