From Wikipedia:
Code: Select all
De Raadt is also well known for his advocacy of free software drivers. He has long been critical of developers of Linux and other free platforms for their tolerance of non-free drivers and acceptance of non-disclosure agreements.
In particular, de Raadt has worked to convince wireless hardware vendors to allow their product firmware to be redistributable freely. These efforts have been largely successful, particularly in negotiations with Taiwanese companies, leading to many new wireless drivers. Today, Theo encourages wireless users to "buy Taiwanese", due to lack of willingness from US companies like Intel to release firmware free from licensing restrictions.
For this de Raadt was awarded the FSF's 2004 Award for the Advancement of Free Software.I don't know about the license for Windows Media Player, but if 9 or 10 allowed redistribution of the file available at microsoft.com, why can't SUSE just make a script that fetches it, extracts it, swipes the .dll files and gives them to MPlayer
And then I can use KPlayer, a nice KDE frontend which sadly hasn't had an update in nearly a year. Also there is a nice Mozilla plugin that plugs MPlayer into Firefox, so it acts a drop in replacement for Windows Media Player, and then streams aren't an issue, I watched Satoru Iwata's, Nintendo's President, speech at E3 with that plugin.
Also, regarding games, Quake 4 has a native Linux version. Not something a non experienced Linux user can install since it includes downloading the Linux installer at id soft's website, installing that and then copying files from the Windows CD to Quake 4 folder.
Epic has shipped Linux installers on the last two versions of Unreal Tournament, 2003 & 2004, and they work great, actually better under Linux and FreeBSD than Windows.
Warcraft 3, Counter-Strike, and supposedly Half-Life 2, run very well under Cedega, version five was just released and it has the CD switch thing fixed, and supports a little bunch of other games.
Also to the small attacks against SUSE on the 5 CD thing, when I first started out using Linux I really liked having lots of packages available because I just couldn't figure that compiling out. Today I can figure it out, so it's not an issue today, but I assure you, it was a nightmare two days after I started using Linux and I need an extra KDE instant messaging app, KMess. Also, if you don't want to download 5 CDs, just do a network install, I think the ISO for that is about a 100 MB, not too bad, and the reason for that is that YaST, the installer, is in Qt and that has a lot of dependencies.
Personally I really don't care if a distro uses 1 or 5 CDs, because I have a nice 1mbit connection so I just pull it down over night, but I can understand people with a 256/128 connection.
Also now that I have SUSE as the subject, you can indeed run apt-get on it, and it's actually very easy to set up and throw Synaptic on, I prefer to use the Smart package manager as it can be set to ignore dependencies and stuff like that so you can lock a version of a package.
Kudos to Connectiva for apt4rpm and Smart!
Finally, thanks to Pat for the credit at the end of the show, happy to be listening to the show, also, I live in Silkeborg not Copenhagen
Silkeborg is not too hard to pronounce, I think you'll get close in the first try hehe.

