Seattle Times Reviews Desktop Linux Distros

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."

Comments

mplayer and xine

[MrSpiff]

"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.

Re:K3B

[budhaboy]

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.

Re:Yeah, audio CD burning...

[O]

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.

Re:Audio CD's

[sharkey]

DELL.

A step in a nice direction.