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It's an interesting point you make.
Currently it's worth avoiding netbooks that have the following hardware:

1. Intel GMA500 aka Poulsbo graphics chipsets. There is no FOSS driver for these. That's because there's a PowerVR core in them. The Fedora Project's Adam Williamson seems to have found some partial drivers hidden away in a quiet little Ubuntu repository where they were dumped by the Intel team. But success seems partial. So for now avoid anything with GMA500.

2. Broadcom wireless. Again avoid these Broadcom 4322 like the fscking plague. Dan Williams (again a Red Hat / Fedora person) has a fairly scathing take on them based on his experiences of trying to get suspend/resume and wireless to work consistently.

3. Elantech touchpads. Bastien Nocera (what is it with all those Red Hat people, don't they like closed-source binary drivers?) may have had some success at wringing some code out of Ubuntu and Intel people to share with the rest of us, but it still seems uncertain.

4. CPU. The Intel Z-series draw less power than the N-series apparently.

5. RAM expansion. Lots of the netbooks have a single, soldered slot. So if you like being stuck with 1GB of RAM while you try to run OpenOffice.org-3 then go ahead, have fun.

So, the bottom line is that the Dell Mini 10v might be OK as regards the graphics (it's GMA950) which in turn means that it doesn't do HDMI and has an unfortunately lower vertical resolution than the Mini10v, but the wireless sucks and the touchpad probably sucks, the RAM is fixed too low.

Looking at the HP Mini 1000s its difficult to tell what wireless they use. Graphics are GMA950 unlike the older HP2133 which used Chrome9 graphics chipsets for which VIA has failed to release FOSS drivers.

Seems like a lot of the netbook producers (even those such as Intel, Dell and Ubuntu that pay lipservice to "Open Source") are having a hard time being honest and straightforward with us.

Dvorak's on to something when he said people who prefer aesthetics could now buy a Mac to run Windows on it (though the reverse will most likely not be true, i.e. you can't run OS X on non-Mac hardware) - left unsaid is, of course, that some people will buyh these machines to run Linux instead.

Targeting a Mac will be easier, sure - some developers will probably buy a Mac and dual-boot (or virtualize) Windows or Linux on it, so there will be more Mac developers.

Thing is, most free software types won't consider OS X free enough - I'm switching back to Linux, personally; and a lot of OSS running on OS X share code with their Linux/Unix/X11 counterparts. Adium uses Gaim as its engine. Dashboard is based on WebCore, which is forked from KHTML - porting it back to KDE would not be too hard, and guess what, there is a GTK port. If efforts like gDesklets flounder, we can possibly port Dashboard wholesale to Linux.

Firefox and Thunderbird runs better on Linux (seriously. Try them on both platforms), and if Dvorak thinks OpenOffice is not user-friendly, he has not tried running it on a Mac yet. Oh, John, OO.o looks much better on Linux than on Windows too - if you're running the 1.1.x series, the Windows version does not have all the UI improvements that GNOME and KDE developers from Novell, Red Hat and others throw into it.

Lots of fun things are happening in the OSS world, especially on the desktop front - Sun and Novell are doing usability testing, Gtk# is making waves, in fact, F-Spot is the best photo-library tool I've seen, certainly looks faster than iPhoto and has cool things like Flickr integration built-in. Don't count us out yet.

Gromit does this and Totem can use Gromit when playing a video.

Just grab a computer and stick 3 video cards in it. Configure X to run multihead and then use mplayer or xine or totem to send the videos to your 3 monitors. If you want to be really cool, you could use gstreamer to build a custom app pretty quickly that sent 3 separate video streams to 3 different monitors and kept everything synchronized with a single point of control.

Looks clean but reminds me just a BIT of totem.

toggle switch somewhere, or perhaps a drop-down to limit the difficulty of choices. Xine pulls this off quite well.

> I love this quote

It could have been better exploited had they mentioned more software, to get the message that they sell a complete solution in a single package. That's a compelling argument for most people I encounter : I tell them everything they need is probably already installed, and if not, they have it at their fingertips in an unified interface (for best results, use EasyURPMI to setup the contrib source). Voilà ! No more hunt-the-missing-software on the Net ! Save your precious time with Linux :-)

> Totem?

Yes, Totem. Although I feel it isn't such a good software. Personally, I use different players for music and videos, because they've different needs that are best solved by specific applications (for instance, I use jukeboxes like JuK and RhytmBox to sort my music).

> Good idea really.

I agree. Another interesting thing is the partnership with Carrefour. They're a big supermarket chain (a bit like Wal-Mart in the US), and certainly a good way to sell more products. What's disappointing, though, is they won't sell it directly in their supermarkets but only through their web site. Oh well, at least it's mentioned on their front page...

I guess you've never seen Totem then?

In that case, vpenis.c may help.

Totem for me, thanks.

There's nothing wrong with choice, variety being the spice of life and all. I personally use(d) WinAMP in Windows because I could feed it a directory of tunes and it would parse and play them for me, complete with pattern searching and sorting by genre (like iTunes). Find me an mp3 player in Linux that does that and I'll marry it. Yes, I'm familiar with Rhythmbox, but I'd like something a little more mature if you don't mind.

Xine? (Well in my opinion, xine is too buggy, crashes on most files and its gui sucks)

• Totem (for GNOME)
• Kaffine (for KDE3)
• OpiePlayer2 (for handhelds even!)

You know the simultaneous best and worst thing about GNU/Linux/OSS etc is there is always another option...

There was a new beta of Totem released yesterday too - it's a GNOME 2 media player based on Xine (it doesn't attempt to reinvent the wheel). The author is also working on a Gstreamer back end for it.

Why do I like it? A quote on their webpage sums it up: "Totem is the only media player I've seen that doesn't attempt to have skins or look like a reject from a 1971 Kenwood catalog." For those of us who like Windows Media Player (pre 8) for its clean and consistent interface and were annoying that Linux doesn't have anything like it, Totem's your project.

Mplayer does some files better than Totem, but if you want to do more than "mplayer This.divx", check it out.

(standard "I have nothing to do with this project other than thinking it's really cool" disclaimer)

Throwaway Question that will Undoubtedly Get Dozens of Answers while the Rest of the Post Goes Unread: Why doesn't Mplayer disable XScreensaver while playing?)

I agree gmplayer is a very poor interface.

I much prefer Totem - although that's Gtk+ based.

You could try KPlayer or eMotion - the only KDE/Qt alternatives I'm aware of.

Or <flamebait>you could just switch to a better desktop</flamebait> - the perfect time now that the 2.4 release is imminent!

Huh? There are legions of piss poor UIs in Windows freeware programs designed by people without a clue. The difference is that the Windows software scene is so large that chances are good that somebody, somewhere has been able to write a program that does roughly what you want, without a sucky UI (sometimes).

Of course, even commercial software has very bad UI sometimes. Parts of Windows or Office have to be seen to be believed - randomly reinventing parts of the widget toolkit, yo.

I don't understand why it's so hard for free software to have good interfaces.

Yawn. It's not. There are equally lots of good free software programs with nice UIs. You don't like the Xine interface? Use Totem. Problem solved.

Like most things, you just have to shop around, instead of pointlessly throwing around stereotypes.

acme is native GNOME2 (although it should work with KDE) and provides an excellent gui for configuring/using those keys.

If you hate inconsistency, then I'd go for Totem instead of Mplayer.

totem is an alternate gui for xine-lib... it's here. I love it.

I'm using totem, a xine frontend version .95, and my xine shows up as .9.18.

I'm using debian sid and those are the latest packages plus all the goodies from marillat.

You can fix the interface by using one of the frontends, like Totem. However, I've tested both xine and MPlayer extensively and found MPlayer much better regarding performance, number of features and stability.

Just because the core Xine team might not be particularly interested in building such an interface themselves doesn't make them "fucktards". It just means they work on what interests them and are happy to leave it to others to fill in the gaps.

This is the only half-decent point of jwz's rant (not review). xine, mplayer and xmms skins are generally hard to read (much like jwz's site) and do not integrate with the desktop very well. you can use sinek for xine, which is the gtk interface.
or you can use totem, which is a gnome2 movie player. it uses the xine libs and kicks ass. looks very nice and plays almost anything.
here is a screenshot
and
here is the url
i think "hissy fit" is the word jwz is looking for rather than rant. if this guy is such a mad coder, why doesn't he do something instead of crying about it? i am sure he could whip an all-singing all-dancing media player in no time at all. lol, right....

This is the only half-decent point of jwz's rant (not review). xine, mplayer and xmms skins are generally hard to read (much like jwz's site) and do not integrate with the desktop very well. you can use sinek for xine, which is the gtk interface.
or you can use totem, which is a gnome2 movie player. it uses the xine libs and kicks ass. looks very nice and plays almost anything.
here is a screenshot
and
here is the url
i think "hissy fit" is the word jwz is looking for rather than rant. if this guy is such a mad coder, why doesn't he do something instead of crying about it? i am sure he could whip an all-singing all-dancing media player in no time at all. lol, right....

You make some great points, but fortunately there are some answers coming to your questions.

Where are the good GUIs for the video players (yes, GUIs, not skins) ?

Nice that you made the distinction. :)

For a totally sweet Xine GUI, check out Totem! It's a really slick, super-easy to use GNOME 2 app for video and DVD. Good stuff, very nice attention to usability.

Where is high quality Real Media playback ?

Real Player 8 works fine on my box! Plus, with Helix going all OSS/Hippy on us, we'll have a (mostly) OSS and completely legal Real Player for Linux this year.

Where is high quality Quicktime playback ?

Shoved up Apple's ass... stupid, politicking bastards.... *mutter*

But really... Totem can do Quicktime, if you get the proper codecs installed for Xine.

Where is .ASF/.WMV/QT streaming support ?

Still not the greatest solution, but Crossover Office and Crossover Plugin do a great job of running WMP and QT right on your desktop.

Yeah, these aren't perfect, but there's obviously some serious progress being made in these directions.

But I'm flying with GStreamer atm and couldnt be happier. Also Xine and MPlayer are top quality too. Especially when used on conjunction with interfaces like Totem, I really couldnt ask for much more! DVD playback is also coming on strong!

Off the top of my head I cant think of anything (apart from DRM) that WMPlayer can do that any of the above can't do anyway? [conspiracy]Maybe that's the point.. this is a cunning plan to get DRM onto Linux :)[/conspiracy] Anyway, by the time it's available the other Linux media players will have either caught up or be better I expect.

2003 will be the year for linux \o/

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