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The real thing that annoys me about opensuse is that certain parts come deliberately crippled (like getting a xine engine that won't play mp3's) and no visible instructions on how to un-cripple.

Yeah - they don't provide certain packages, such as the MP3 stuff, to avoid potential legal problems. There is a simple way to fix it though - add a Packman repository to your list of sources in YaST, and update/install whatever you need. Here's one location:

http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/10.2/

After you've added it, start the software manager and add/update "lame" and "xine-lib". It will automatically add any other libraries you need, except for libdvdcss (required for watching DVDs) - the RPM package that Packman has does not contain the source, but the site does give you some tips about how to get it and build the package; it's not difficult.

Another tip: set the filter to "Installation Summary", check all the boxes except "Do not install", then click the menu item Packages->All in This List->Update if newer version available. That will mark the newer Packman versions for installation over the original SuSE versions. Uncheck "Keep" and "Protected" to see a list of which packages it wants to change before clicking "Accept". There will probably be quite a few, so you may not want to do them all at once.

-- Steve

Intel invented ieee1394, dumped it as a technology not worth pursuing and Apple picked it up and ran with it.

That's completely and utterly false. Apple invented ieee 1394 in the 80s.

I mean, come on! That took all of 3 seconds of searching on google.

Just FYI incase your reading this, rather than compiling things simply add: http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/9.3/ as a source for the yast package manager as described here http://susewiki.apanela.com/tutorials:yastsources Then you can install the w32codecs, and xine and mplayer etc without any crippling

Installation sources for YaST:

http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/9 .3
http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/9.3

Please enlighten me: what peer-to-peer, hot-pluggable, high-speed peripheral bus preceeded FireWire? And please don't tell me that it's just a re-engineered, polished version of USB, because you'd be wrong.

The first time I heard the name "FireWire" was in an article in an issue of MacWEEK in '93 or '94. According to this, they started working on it even earlier than that. They just took their time and got it right, (and waited for the world to need that kind of throughput and versatility) before they put it into a computer in early 1999.

And yeah, ZeroConf is polished, existing technology. Polished, existing *Apple* technology. It's the grandson of AppleTalk networking, circa 1985.

~Philly

Here were I study in Germany we've got hotspots in almost every classroom and pretty much everybody has a laptop. This is because of the payment facilities given by the Uni (granted, they get sucky models and prices are not so cheap, but I won't get into this or I'll never end this post). Unfortunately few people really use their laptop in class for taking notes. Almost everybody else is using IM/surfing the net/watching movies (!!) during class. Regardless, using your laptop during a boring lecture is much better than falling asleep, IMHO.

Still, I'd be curious to know in which place on the list my university would end up.

R.

Actually Apple invented the FireWire standard to replace SCSI back when the average PC was running DOS. They didn't start using it until the later '90s, but it is an Apple product.