Monday, February 27, 2006
Another Linux Distro
For the past two weeks I've been using the Ubuntu 5.10 Linux. It's the most popular Linux according to those who keep track of such things. I was using Mandriva 2006 until the middle of this month and wanted to experiment a little more. I re-installed Mandriva 2006 with the KDE user interface. After this I found that X crashed when I tried to view a video file in "full screen" mode. I'd never seen this kind of problem before. It seems as though the Gnome interface is less demanding on my system. There were some other problems that lead me to abandon Mandriva, the MP3 player never really automounted properly. I'd have to reboot to mount it. The other problem is that Mandriva is not a free distro and there was no automatic updating. I liked this feature in the Suse 10.0. A little green icon would appear every few days letting me know that newer and presumably better software was available. I suppose Mandriva has something similar but I never found out because I didn't wish to pay.
With Ubuntu being totally free, including the update advisor that I missed in Suse, there are some drawbacks. The lack of MP3 and other Windows codecs is the most notable. Previously I abandonned Ubuntu after I found that the codecs I'd installed somehow crippled the applications that used them, namely, the Totem or Rythmbox players. I found instead that there is a package of applications put together by Arnieboy. I found that I had some trouble with Azureus, had to remove it and re-install it in home directory to get the automatic updating to work properly. Otherwise I've had no trouble. I would only recommend Ubuntu with Arnieboy's package.
I may have solved the automounting of the MP3 player. It seems fine now but may be a little buggy. It may take a little more tinkering with to make it work as I want it to.
With Ubuntu being totally free, including the update advisor that I missed in Suse, there are some drawbacks. The lack of MP3 and other Windows codecs is the most notable. Previously I abandonned Ubuntu after I found that the codecs I'd installed somehow crippled the applications that used them, namely, the Totem or Rythmbox players. I found instead that there is a package of applications put together by Arnieboy. I found that I had some trouble with Azureus, had to remove it and re-install it in home directory to get the automatic updating to work properly. Otherwise I've had no trouble. I would only recommend Ubuntu with Arnieboy's package.
I may have solved the automounting of the MP3 player. It seems fine now but may be a little buggy. It may take a little more tinkering with to make it work as I want it to.
