thelinuxlink.net

I'm listening to the latest episode of TLLTS now, and I have to say I like the show. I also wanted to point how that Mr. Raymond mentioned linux losing unless a person could play every video/audio file in the world easily, and we do that now. I'm on gentoo, and am a cg artist. From forums for cg artists and such, I download lots of people's rendered animations and/or timelapse screencaptures and such in all sorts of various codecs. All I had to do to be able to watch them all was to simply type a few commands into the terminal:

simple things like 'USE="win32codecs quicktime" emerge mplayer '

the step by step instructions are all posted on the gentoo wiki with the commands all to use in clear sight. Sure, it's not pre-packaged with the distro or anything, but this way they don't get sued, especially on gentoo since they only distribute the source to mp3/dvd/wmv/mov playback libraries and are compiled on the individual computer thanks to portage (the reason I'm on gentoo). It was much easier to get dvd playback, mp3's and wmv's and everything all running on gentoo (given the initial installation of gentoo involved going through the handbook, which is quite well written) than when I tried fedora core 1 and suse 9.2pro and such.

Oh yeah, my first post, yay. Hi, I'm Ryan. I'm a freshman on his way to Colorado School of Mines where I'll major in EE. I dual boot into windows because our school does alot of work with AutoCad, so I have windows just in case so I don't have to spent time in the lab all day to make stuffs. I've been primarily on linux for 2 years or so now.

That post was supposed to be as me, but I guess I hadn't logged in first. sorry!

I agree. If you take away the single "bad" point that gentoo requires compilation for most everything, the rest of the stuff they've done is extremely well produced. The Gentoo Handbook takes you through an installation that is very close to an LFS install, and does so in a very understandable and noobish-friendly manner.

The only problems I had with gentoo were getting things like hot-plugging working, and this I attribute fully to my laziness in not reading the howto's or wiki. Now that I'm starting to run into trouble with Ubuntu (mostly because I wan't to "break" the default release), I am seriously considering going back to gentoo. If I could just start with a full Ubuntu-esk system and then take over with gentoo, that would be so hot.

muk_amd64 wrote:I'm listening to the latest episode of TLLTS now, and I have to say I like the show. I also wanted to point how that Mr. Raymond mentioned linux losing unless a person could play every video/audio file in the world easily, and we do that now.

I think by easily he meant click on it and it plays, not you can recompile your software to do that with instructions you can find on the internet. Even a fully updated Windows XP system won't play DVDs, though. At least they're nice enough to send you to a web site where you can pay $10-$20 for a codec that will let you play DVDs. I haven't checked MP3s, but I remember when Windows wouldn't play those either.

So far I don't think there's a Linux distro that does this (out of the box) without paying licensing fees or bending the law.

bosshoff wrote:The only problems I had with gentoo were getting things like hot-plugging working, and this I attribute fully to my laziness in not reading the howto's or wiki. Now that I'm starting to run into trouble with Ubuntu (mostly because I wan't to "break" the default release), I am seriously considering going back to gentoo. If I could just start with a full Ubuntu-esk system and then take over with gentoo, that would be so hot.

I'm also having touble with my Kubuntu. The respository for it is slow to release new version of anything but koffice and kde (which is odd considering how big they are). I've noticed the gentoo repospitory has a lot more apps that are updated a lot sooner. I'll probly switch over to gentoo after my birthday (October 26) because thats when Im gonna get an AMD64 CPU and nVidia Graphics Card.

CptnObvious999 wrote: I'm also having touble with my Kubuntu. The respository for it is slow to release new version of anything but koffice and kde (which is odd considering how big they are).

I know I sound like a broken record, but give Kanotix a try. Cutting edge Debian that works!

I might check out kanotix, is there a livecd version of it? but with a new AMD64 since most programs arn't optimized for 64bit yet I think my system would run much faster with Gentoo. Im also getting cable broadband internet (finally!) soon so later this week Im gonna be downloading lots of cool livecd's (and the cool new Knoppix LiveDVD) to add to my already hugh collection of Linux CD's.

For you

http://forum.kanotix.net/viewtopic.php?t=8474

It's not like you download the source yourself and sit there compiling everything, you type two words into the terminal and it does it for you, heh.
All you have to do is : emerge gnome, and it'll download and compile all packages for gnome. And for people who don't want to do the initial setup, I forgot to mention Vidalinux. It's gentoo with some binary packages to get you started and the anaconda installer. So you're into a gentoo desktop very quickly and still have all the power of gentoo once you're set up I haven't gotten to try it personally, but I have friends who use it on their laptops and such because they don't want to wait and it works quite well.

Ill have to try Kanotix. If I don't like it I will try VidaLinux. btw I have noticed Gentoo is much faster to release things is Kanotix as fast at doing the same?

It's a live distro, so if you don't like it you've only wasted the cost of a CD-R.

I'm not quite sure what is meant my "things" but Kano seems to update the distribution every 2 to 3 months or so.

As for packages, it's what ever gets added to Debian SID. I don't really follow or compare repositories, so I can't really comment on that.

As far as I'm aware, the Kanotix repositories are "cutting edge" SID.

I also just noticed that Knoppix is now using the installer from Kanotix (which was originally Knoppix but improved upon by Kano). And a screenshot of Symphony also shows the Kanotix installer.

Cool