here [networkmirror.com] . Though I doubt that that a review of Linspire is going to get slashdotted late on a Friday afternoon.

Guess it depends on definitions. Fedora isn't a retail desktop Linux distribution, is it? Fedora's counterpart, is an enterprise solution, and thus doesn't fit the "desktop" modifier.

In fact, offhand, the only other retail, desktop Linux distribution I can think of is SuSE, which is downloadable for free, but costs money if you want it on CDs. The full retail package of SuSE is around $90, but again, you're getting more than just a download.

I have seen Debian CDs for sale in retail stores, and they were less than $50 I believe, however I haven't seen this in awhile.

Truthfully, I'd like to know about all these other retail desktop LInux distributions....

Distrowatch has a page discussing the "freeness" (I know, not a word) of various linux distros:

http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=freedom/ [distrowatch.com]

Linspire is listed under "4".

Totem with gstreamer seems to handle most WMV files fine. Multimedia support is inconsistent in the open source community, but that doesn't mean that it's lacking. You need to know where to look.

Incidentally, I use Debian, which handled all sorts of multimedia playback right out of the box, so to speak. So in some cases, you don't even have to look at all.

Why should you pay for GPL software? Simple. Because you don't want to compile it yourself. (No, I don't mean you personally, of course.) It's the same reason as I'd pay for plumbing. I don't want to be elbow-deep in sewage, and I wouldn't have a clue what to do anyway.

The software is free, but that doesn't prevent others from making a profit off services. The GPL specifically allows it. And the point of the CNR service is that it supplies working software to users who either can't or won't compile their own. Is that wrong?

By the way, Windows doesn't come with a compiler. OS X does, but you have to install the development tools specifically. Ubuntu doesn't have the development toolchain in the basic installation. It's not as unusual as you seem to think, at least for a regular-person-targeted OS.

I'm running Slackware 10.1, but 10.0 also worked (didn't try to get Xine working with any earlier versions).

So:
1) Install Slackware
2) Grab the codecs off of the MPlayer webpage
3) Put them in /usr/lib/win32
4) Play WMV files (and others)
5) ???
6) Profit!

Again, Xine works great under Slackware. All you have to do is grab the codecs off of the MPlayer site and drop them into /usr/lib/win32, and it works with the default Xine package.

Pat's the man. He'd never purposely cripple a package. $25 for the subscription, $40 to just order the CDs as a oneshot. (And yes, I'm a complete Slackware fanboy.)

Jeff

...but Linspire sucks because you have to run as r00t.

(yeah, yeah, but I felt someone had to say it)

For the zen you need libnjb and gnomad. Gnomad works for me, sorta buggy though.

Linux needs a decent unified media device access library. Kio, gnome-vfs or the filesystem are "good enough" but they're not fantastic ;), and loads of different types of library being hard coded into the apps isn't a good thing. Freedesktop media access would be good.

My biggest problem are Sony media devices (netmd, network walkman).. I think only a very small few of them work.

I agree with your assessment. Multimedia on Linux is behind other platforms. Real, Linspire, Red Hat, Novell and others aggressively working to change this landscape. Specifically, we are now working on the Helix Player 2.0 https://player.helixcommunity.org/ [helixcommunity.org] which provides for support of Windows Media, MP3, RealVideo, RealAudio, Flash, etc as well as other great features like Ad-free radio and Automatic Bandwidth Detection.

I urge all interested to join us by joining the project mailing lists and letting us know if you encounter and bugs in the product.

Kevin Foreman,
GM, Helix

I'm running Mandrake 10.2 on a PII 266. It's a little slow to boot, and doesn't compile stuff all that fast, but otherwise it's perfectly good for browsing the web, editing photos from my digicam, typing up documents, and most other day-to-day tasks. I don't understand why they would say 800 MHz is the minimum.

Good clarification. The FAQ refers to version 1.0 of the Helix Player, which is the open source media player that powered the no-cost RealPlayer 10. The Helix Player 2.0, adds "support" for many more codecs and formats. Note, that in many cases a legal commercial use license will need to be obtained by the Distro in order to ship this "supported" format. So to be clear, the Helix Player is 100% GPL open source. Version 1.0.5 is gold and we are working on version 2.0. The Helix Player powers the no-cost RealPlayer which is a superset and adds the ability to play MP3, RealAudio, RealVideo, Flash, etc. Sorry for the confusion and I look forward to seeing you on the Helix User forums and mailing lists. Kevin

doesn't totem just use xine-lib?

I'm lucky I didn't have to worry about multimedia support

I just emerged mplayer and win32codecs

and on my ubuntu box I just followed ubuntuguide.org's instructions.

No problems at all.

I can't say I've shared your experience, the only dodgy part was getting DVDs to play while I was still using Mandrake, the (well known) trick is to install libdvdread and decss, after that it works perfectly. I'm now using Gentoo, and multimedia is absolutely zero effort to get working. Portage has pulled in all of the codecs (win32 + others) for me automagically and I have yet to find a video I can't play, the same goes for DVDs.

I'd like to point out that XMMS didn't drop mp3 support. Distributions like RedHat and Fedora strip the mp3 support out.

I'll install xmms from source, and the latest versions are of great use to me.

Ubuntu has one CD and unlike with MS Windows you are mostly done after that one CD.