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Seattle Times Reviews Desktop Linux Distros

Posted by timothy on from the are-we-there-yet dept.

prostoalex writes "Seattle Times section on Personal Technology compares Xandros and Lindows as two alternatives to Windows for desktop computing. Their verdict: installation - excellent; OpenOffice - good enough; digital cameras, printers and other peripherals - excellent; CD burning - no problems; video playback - could be better (with more progress bars and support for Apple's formats); digital camcorders - poor; burning audio CDs - poor; Net access and Web browsing - no problems."

16 of 463 comments (clear)

  1. Audio CD's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Audio CD's are no problem with applications such as K3b. Heck, even regular cdrecord burns audio cd's without a problem.

    1. Re:Audio CD's by ravydavygravy · · Score: 4, Informative

      RTA:

      I couldn't figure out how to save CD songs in their original .cda format for copying onto blank CDs. I've been spoiled by Apple's iTunes' ability to convert and copy in different formats. The software handled MP3s fine, however.

      He couldn't save as .cda, but otherwise thought they were fine apps. The ./story is a wee bit misleading on that front...

      Dave

    2. Re:Audio CD's by queen+of+everything · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you need to buy a pre-built PC, here's a good one at Wal-Mart . I hope that link works, its kind of long.

      Anyway, I just got one for work, I work for a small company and it is happily running FreeBSD. I haven't really had any problems with it.

      --
      "Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
    3. Re:Audio CD's by sharkey · · Score: 5, Informative
      DELL.

      A step in a nice direction.

      --

      --
      "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
    4. Re:Audio CD's by ookaze · · Score: 4, Informative

      You are right but, before Linux 2.6, burning audio CD on the fly could take a very long time, or perhaps even impossible. I ran into issues with burning audio CD on the fly before kernel 2.6. On the fly was so long (was going at 1X instead of 16X), that I was compelled to burn in two steps (extract then burn images).
      Now, it works perfectly. The author also has other issues too, but my guess is he was not using K3B. Because K3B does everything he wanted to do (except extracting in .cda format I think, which is stupid, as WAV is the same in quality).

      I agree with the other appreciations though.
      For camcorder, I agree more on the concern of video softwares, still lacking on Linux.

  2. K3B by dew-genen-ny · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seriously, Audio CDs - Poor ????

    K3B is the best piece of buring software that I have ever used.... makes nero seem pretty shocking....

    --
    tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
    1. Re:K3B by budhaboy · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm using a nearly new version of K3B and it won't let me burn CDs from Mp3's, and it won't tell me why. This is a pretty serious problem.

    2. Re:K3B by bierik · · Score: 4, Informative

      Ever used mp3burn? It's absolutely easy to use. The program burns your mp3s on the fly (ie you don't need storage place on your harddrive for wav files).
      You can burn all mp3's in the current directory by using

      mp3burn -o 'dev=x,x,x speed=XX' *mp3

      By using the option '-c 80:00' you can make sure all songs actually fit onto the cd. mp3burn can also be used to burn other formats such as ogg- or flac-files

  3. mplayer and xine by MrSpiff · · Score: 5, Informative

    "video playback - could be better (with more progress bars and support for Apple's formats)"

    how is mplayer and xine not sufficient? mplayer has OSD progress bars even and quicktimes movies has never been a problem.

    1. Re:mplayer and xine by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm assuming they mean out-of-the-box configuration or available packages. I'm using Mandrake 9.2 and I know that MPlayer isn't included with that. Downloading MPlayer, and getting all the required plugins for different video formats isn't that easy. Well, wouldn't be very easy for Joe Average using Lindows or Xandros

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:mplayer and xine by RDeepak · · Score: 4, Informative

      mplayer does come bundled with Mandrake 9.2 and it did play all my divx's and dvd's just fine.

    3. Re:mplayer and xine by Ploum · · Score: 4, Informative

      In order to see divx or xvid movie on Windows, you have to download and install the codec. Am I wrong ?

      --
      Ploum.net.
  4. Re:Yeah, audio CD burning... by O · · Score: 5, Informative

    Are you running kernel 2.6? I used to have shit like that all the time on 2.4, but it never happens with 2.6. I'd definitely upgrade if you haven't.

    Especially now that all programs that use cdrecord's library (libscg, I think) can write directly to ATAPI burners instead of having to use SCSI emulation. That took care of a lot of the problem for me, too.

    I think they might also try to get real-time priority if you run as root, as there is usually a message complaining about something like that if you don't run them as root. Sudo is your friend.

    --

    1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
  5. Re:little respect by Telex4 · · Score: 4, Informative

    In the first paragraph he suggests that worms, viruses and popups are somehow the fault of and only restricted to Windows, and using Linux will solve all those problems.

    This is not the reason to switch operating systems, it is a reason to use better software, patch your system, have better security practices etc. Articles that start with this proclamation don't warrant reading any further.

    Given that this article was written for the average computer user, I'd say you're dead wrong. My housemates all run Windows (98/XP) and they have constant problems with viruses and spyware. I help them where I can, but even with me around, they, as your average users, get screwed by it.

    I moved my girlfriend and my family over to GNU/Linux, and they've not had any problems. All of a sudden they don't suffer from worms, viruses, popups and adware.

    Average users simply do not protect themselves from crap like worms, viruses, popups and spyware, for whatever reasons. So you see, it's a perfectly valid reason to switch for many people. If Windows can't protect average users from that crap, average users should be looking elsewhere.

  6. Re:Yeah, audio CD burning... by ozbird · · Score: 4, Informative

    ATAPI support isn't quite there yet. If you have a good burn, it works great. If you have a glitch (e.g. with CD-RW media), the drive tends to be locked in some kind of retry loop, and you have to reboot or even power off to clear it. I didn't strike these problems using SCSI emulation. It's no biggy - the more I break, the more data gets fed back to the developers. :-)

  7. digital camcorders... by unknown_host · · Score: 4, Informative

    camstream is a nice collection of tools for webcams and other video-devices that uses video4linux2. Combining it with some Image Processing Library(gimp?) and a fancier gui should make it a decent enough tool.