Tell me the one about Freespire again......

[schotty]

I'm only about a half hour into trying this out, but is this not the distro you'd give the newbie?

I gave away copies of Linspire to noobs that were tiring of MS and I knew could get away with going Linux. The only issue I had and understand the dilemma is the weak hardware support that came out of the box. Unserstandably they were not as speedy as Fedora/Red Hat or SuSE or Ubuntu with getting hardware working easily. Most notably with kernel module updates. The most common issue is with ATI and nVIDIA drivers. Check the forums out over there and see.

This is where Freespire should help out. Not being 100% CNR (going outside was a bit risky at times with LOS), this makes things alot better for them. Plus if some care is done, there is a good chance that a separate community repo can be setup for adding into LOS so oddball packages can be added easier and alleviate the need for custom tarball or foreign DEB package installations.

The only failure I saw in LOS was that. Slow module updates. When a noob hops over with a %100 linux compliant box, but cant work because the nVIDIA driver is too old to support the new whizbang 7xxx series cards but only 6xxx is supported still -- there are issues. And we (mostly all of us) can be honest -- we can take for granted the amount of dev shit really does sit on out system. LOS doesnt include any of that out of the box, and it needs to be CNR'ed. That is a weird thing to try to convey.

Until we have a better cooperation with hardare vendors with respect to how it gets distributed, this is expected to continue. My Fedora and Ubuntu rigs dont have that issue (the community makes great driver packages), but the arent really liable. LOS is, as is Red Hat and SuSE for what happens with packages they spew out.

I think that the community distros are far superior for desktop use than the commercial ones (RHEL, SLED, Turbo). And its for fixing this one nagging issue.

BTW, welcome to the world of Linspire! Its a great company and has a ton of cool employees. Its nice that more people can see their work without have to shell $$$ out just to taste it!

(No I dont work for them, but met alot of em at their Desktop Linux Summit in April).

[Tsuroerusu]

I think that the community distros are far superior for desktop use than the commercial ones (RHEL, SLED, Turbo). And its for fixing this one nagging issue.

Novell has actually done a lot in terms of driver support, read this post I did a week or two ago: viewtopic.php?p=8719#8719

[snarkout]

I read this and thought I'd try converting some of my mpeg videos (wink wink) to theora, which uses ogg audio. The quality of the theoras were the same, but they were about half the size!! And the ogg I created from my CD's were also smaller and had slightly better quality. good stuff.

Yeah I ripped one DVD to theora at real high quality and was amazed by the file size compared to the quality. Unfortunately thoggen seems to crash mid-way through encoding the DVD and the preview version of K3B that allows DVD ripping doesn't even allow me to use Theora. Does anyone know of any good DVD ripping programs? (don't worry, I own the DVD )

Depends on what you mean - if you mean ogg, no. If you mean 9 to 5 I like both lxdvdrip (CLI) and k9copy (Recent versions have been awesome). If you mean to avi/mp4/etc, I like acidrip (mencoder) and dvd::rip (transcode). Avidemux is a must-have app, too.

[snarkout]

Oh, and dvd::rip will do ogg supposedly, but it's always crashed when I've messed with it, and I honestly didn't/don't care enough to get it working correctly.