SuSE Linux 9.3 Professional Review at Mad Penguin

llywelynelysium writes "Mad Penguin has an excellent review of the upcoming SuSE 9.3 Professional release. The review is mostly positive, commenting on SUSE's improved speed, improved Gnome suppport, inclusion of Xen, and interestingly, the use of Firefox as the default browser. On the other hand, the review states that Novell has futher crippled the multimedia capabilities of their distribution by removing MP3 playback support. SUSE scores three stars in the end."

Comments

No MP3?

[bcmm]

Does this mean no standarad apps like XMMS?

And from Novell's page:

iPod Compatibility--Manage your iPod files easily with both KDE 3.4 and GNOME 2.10.

WTF? Using WMA? Or using files the computer can't play without an iPod?

Re:No MP3?

[rogabean]

FC3 did the same thing taking away ability to play MP3 out of the box. The apps like XMMS and the like are there but they can not play MP3.

Of course all easily remedied, but an annoyance all the same.

Will end up being like DVD playback. Not included but you can to get it.

Re:No MP3?

[bcmm]

So what does XMMS play then? Your OGG Vorbis collection?

For most people, XMMS is a single-purpose application!

YOU Fixes MP3 Issues

[mlmitton]

According to the thread here:

http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?showtopic=1308 6

YOU already has fixes to the kdemultimediapackage that corrects the MP3 problems. I don't know why they'd cripple MP3 support to begin with, but it's nice they fixed things so quickly.

Re:YOU Fixes MP3 Issues

[eviltypeguy]

More authoritative source:

http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2005-Ap r/0665.html

The real thing is that they're not including MP3 support by default due to possible legal conflicts, namely software patents ;) They're available through you as multimedia packs and come with the warning that they should only be used if "legal in your jurisdiction" or something to that effect.

further crippled?

[Hamstij]

If removing mp3 further cripples their multimedia support, what is already missing?

Re:further crippled?

[Too Much Noise]

If removing mp3 further cripples their multimedia support, what is already missing?

mpeg4 and DVD playback

xmms

[Esine]

They removed mp3 support because of license restrictions. Same thing as Red Hat and Fedora did. And Mandrake and Ubuntu, etc.

And btw who uses mp3s anymore? Ogg Vorbis beats mp3 hands down \o/
Ogg is free, (supported by xmms), patentless and offers better compression (or what ever you call it) than mp3.

Re:xmms

[NeoChaosX]

And btw who uses mp3s anymore?

Lots and lots of people. MP3 is pretty much a de facto standard for digital music files. Do a search on eMule or any other file-sharing service. Most of the music you'll find in those services is MP3. MP3 has become the word in the mainstream to describe music files, or is at least the one format most commonly associated with them. OGG may be a better technology, but that doesn't take away from the fact that MP3 is more or less another word for "digital music" for years now.

Re:xmms

[RootsLINUX]

I use Ogg whenever I can, and my design team is using the format in a game we're developing. But Ogg has one critical flaw (which isn't really it's own fault), and that is it's not supported by any portable media players (that I know of). Now I'm finding myself going back and creating MP3 versions for all my OGG files so I can play the music I like in my iPod shuffle. You *can* convert Ogg to MP3 (and vice versa) with ease, however both are lossy formats that throw away different parts of the audio, so if you use a converter tool then you'll have reduced quality of the version you converted to as opposed to if you did it from a raw WAV source.

I would absolutely *LOVE* to see a (decent) portable media player that supports Ogg. Unfortunately though it doesn't seem like the hardware manufactures are interested. =(

Re:xmms

[artifex2004]

Ogg is free, (supported by xmms), patentless and offers better compression (or what ever you call it) than mp3.

Oh, yes, and hundreds of portable devices support it, also. Not to mention the huge existing filebase, right?

BTW, I think you mean Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is a file format, and within it, just for audio, there's Vorbis, Speex, and FLAC support, etc. Ogg also does video, using Theora, among others. Vorbis is likely the most popular audio codec using Ogg. However, Vorbis is lossy, so it makes no sense to convert MP3s over through yet another stage of lossy compression just because it's spiffy. And for people with gigabytes of recorded music, some of it live, re-ripping or re-recording with Vorbis as the only codec not only may not be practical, it may not even be possible, sometimes.

Re:xmms

[Albertosaurus]

Neuros, anyone?

Re:xmms

[swv3752]

Here, They are out there, but it is a limited subset. Anyone have a the Enox player? I am looking for a new player that uses a regular battery. I have an old Rio that works well but 96mb is a bit limited.

Re:xmms

[bcmm]

And btw who uses mp3s anymore? Ogg Vorbis beats mp3 hands down \o/

Who uses Windows anymore? Everyone. Sure, they should all use Linux (Ogg) instead, but they don't, because they aren't very clever or can't be bothered or haven't heard of it or because their work software (mp3 player) won't support it.

Re:xmms

[Rhaythe]

Using your mp3 VS Ogg argument, we can conclude that since DVD's are out on the market, who would use VHS anymore?

ANSWER - A lot of people. According to a quick google search, VHS players still outnumber DVD players in households 4 to 1.

Removed MP3 as well?

[Spudley]

On the other hand, the review states that Novell has futher crippled the multimedia capabilities of their distribution by removing MP3 playback support.

Growl. Oh well, guess I won't be bothering with that upgrade then. :-(

It's bad enough that they crippled Kaffine/Xine in 9.2 -- You can't even download and install the missing libs; they've blocked them from within the software - if you really want to play DVDs in 9.2, you have to remove Xine and install a non-crippled version from elsewhere, and then install the missing libs as well. Way too much hassle to be worth the effort for a home user. But I don't mind. I can watch DVDs without SuSE's help. MP3s are different - I play music all the time on my computer, so if MP3 playing is crippled in the same way in 9.3, I certainly won't be upgrading, no matter how good the new KDE sounds.

Re:Removed MP3 as well?

[Zorbie]

A hassle? It took me less then 5 minutes to google for the correct packages, download them all and install them, to restore mp3/divx/etc. It's removed because of licensing restrictions. It's not their fault, blame the damn patent Nazi's out there. The files all exist to correct this 'feature' on servers out of the country and outside US jurisdiction. Sure, I'm a Linux user, but I'm no guru at it. I'm still learning the higher level stuff. Windows, I do in my sleep. Besides, like Windows, if you're looking for help as a new user, you ask a friend or post to a message board and they're quite happy to help. It's rare to have any issue not resolved inside of a half hour if you really try.

This matters not at all to me...

[suitepotato]

...as their live DVD is a memory hogging behemoth the likes of which Redmond could not devise. 256MB are like a morsel to it. It crashes on my machine. Not a really good first impression when every other live CD/DVD I've tried hasn't come close to failing over memory size.

MP3 support is almost a non-issue if I'm doing something serious like serving files, doing a network border gateway, etc. If I was using it for my desktop then I'd be ticked. If it would run on my desktop without another $500 worth of RAM. Which it doesn't. So it doesn't really matter.

I can understand why the low star rating entirely though. I expect better of Novell than this.

I'm running the RC...

[(H)elix1]

And it seems OK. On the plus side, it picked up the hardware nicely. I did not even know my t42p even had blue tooth, much less a Linux driver for it. Wireless just worked, sound, video (non accelerated) without any horking about.

The only rough spot was x would hang if I logged out the user. I could kill x with a cntr-alt-back, but the system would not nicely shut down. A minor nitpick was a fairly normal install without openoffice (would grab that and a few others fresh from the net) still required five bloody CD's to install. How hard is it to arrange a CD to have all the required packages on the first one or two iso images?

The MP3 thing pisses me off. I installed it on a spare drive since it was still a RC, so only tested a handful of apps. Rational's IDE has issues, but it looks like I can fix the scripts. Had it been a real install, I'd be a lot angry to find what looks like a sound card issue was a malformed player.

Ogg Vorbis Players

[stu42j]

Actually there are many portable players that support Ogg Vorbis. Most notably: players from iRiver, the Neuros, and the Rio Karma.

Full List

Re:Ogg Vorbis Players

[rogabean]

I think he meant... iPod doesn't support it..

ok sarcasm off...

I wasn't aware that many portable players were supporting it... good to know.

But for me the issue is needing an in-dash car stereo that supports it...

Re:Ogg Vorbis Players

[stu42j]

Well, there is the PhatBox but that probably isn't quite what you wanted.

Summary

[biophysics]

Features

* Linux kernel 2.6.11.4
* GCC 3.3.5/glibc 2.3.4
* Xorg 6.8.2
* GNOME 2.10
* KDE 3.4
* OpenOffice.org 2.0 PR
* Xen 2.0.5c-4 virtualization software
* Firefox 1.0.1
* Beagle desktop search
* F-Spot 0.0.12 image manager
* NetApplet network connection manager
* RealPlayer 10
* Adobe Acrobat 7

>Relatively new 03/16/2005 Linux kernel 2.6.11.4
>Quite disappointed with (old) GCC not much use if you have a Pentium-M notebook
>X.org new February 9, 2005

Re:Summary

[destuxor]

Great find. For those of you who aren't into Linux enough to know those numbers, that's stunningly up-to-date. If you're asking why I even bring it up, many Linux distributions stick with an application/library or whatnot that they know works reliably. RedHat only recently moved to kernel 2.6.x. The reason they'd kept the 2.4.x kernel for so long was that many RedHat users have applications or drivers that are only available precompiled for that RedHat kernel and do not work on anything else.
I've noticed a lot of people talking about how SuSE, RedHat, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Xandros, Linspire, etc. do not contain support for MP3s and DVDs out of the box. The reason for this has already been stated - it is illegal to distribute unlicensed binaries of these libraries. However, no one will complain if you download libdvdcss and so forth on your own.
AFAIK, Linspire is the only vendor to sell a licensed version of Xine in binary format. I've heard rumors of a Linux PowerDVD but haven't found the product to buy at Cyberlinks webpage. The only reason I looked was that there are some bugs in the current stable version of xinelib (if it works, don't fix it!). I do, however, wonder if PowerDVD for Linux will suffer the same ineluctable fate as NeroLINUX, especially upon reviewing products superceeded by open source clones such as StarOffice and VMWware.
However, compiling your own libraries for playing encrypted DVDs in Fedora isn't always easy. It's actually one of the principal reasons I switched to Gentoo. Slackware also makes it easy to get MP3/DVD support. This is just one of the many advantages to using a source-driven Linux distribution.

Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3 in many ways.

[jbn-o]

The review fails to convey any comprehension of why MP3 support is missing in the most widely-used GNU/Linux distributions ("I confess to not knowing all of the specifics regarding the legalities of MP3 playback [...]")? This point was apparently important enough to the reviewer to lower the overall score of SUSE and recommend installing the proprietary RealPlayer software (turning what might otherwise be a free software system into something far less trustworthy, sharable, and inspectable).

What is impressive (and depressing at the same time) is how many people reviewing various free software operating systems don't seem to understand why there's no MP3 encoding/decoding software bundled with the OS, despite the availability of such software online.

As for using Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3, I say you're right on. Perhaps more people should examine the situation from an ethical standpoint: it's not ethical to distribute media files and software that will get the users into trouble with the law, particularly when there's an unencumbered alternative which sounds better at comparable compression rates and has better tagging facilities. If you must distribute MP3s, distribute Ogg Vorbis files right along side the MP3s, so people have to risk committing patent infringement if they don't want to. If you want to be a really nice distributor, make sure both lossy encodings are generated from the same source file--don't transcode one lossy encoding into another if you don't have to. In so many situations I see online, people who stress "best tool for the job" cave into a self-fulfilling argument of popularity (Ogg Vorbis will not be more popular if you don't use it).

A similar situation exists for FLAC versus Shorten; I see a lot of Shorten files on archive.org and it makes me sad to see that happen because Shorten is non-free and even the zero cost Shorten source code is not irrevocably licensed. This is hardly an appropriate choice for long-term archiving. Meanwhile, FLAC reference source code is licensed under an irrevocable free software license, FLAC is not patent encumbered (as far as I know), FLAC is supported in some portable digital audio players, FLAC compresses better than Shorten, and FLAC lets you easily apply an Ogg wrapper (giving one all the advantages Ogg brings). There is currently a problem dealing with Ogg FLAC files, but I suspect that this is not a showstopper and can be remedied with some improvements in software. I doubt you'll find all of these ethical and technical advantages in other lossless compressors. On top of all that, Josh Coalson (the author of FLAC) seems to be a cooperative developer who solicits working with those trying to add FLAC support to their programs.

Re:Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3 in many ways.

[bcmm]

What is the restriction on MP3 exactly? I know there are a few GPL libraries for decoding, so is the restriction a patent on the actaul format?

Re:Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3 in many ways.

[jbn-o]

The algorithms used to make and decode MP3s are patented by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (licenses are paid through Thomson). Thus, in countries which observe software patents (such as the US), any implementation of those algorithms cannot be legally distributed without paying a patent license fee. Fraunhofer and Thomson claim that the relevant patents apply in many countries besides the US (warning: this page lists patents you might not wish to become familiar with). The patent holder determines what the fee is and they can change the fee at any time or refuse to issue a license to a particular would-be licensee. Most patent holding corporations tie the license fee to the number of copies of programs distributed (which means such payment schemes are incompatible with free software).

mp3licensing.com, the site which lists the license schedule, lists a one-time payment for the MP3 decoder (between US$50,000 and US$60,000), but as far as I know, nobody has paid that fee. The encoder has no one-time fee, and thus cannot be legally distributed as free software in countries where software patents exist.

I suspect that in some years when these patents have expired, there will be a lot of GNU/Linux distributions picking up support to make and play MP3 files. Ogg Vorbis will still be a better option on technical grounds, however. If you're encoding human spoken voice, consider Speex with or without the Ogg container. I'm very impressed with what it can do in such a small file.

Re:Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3 in many ways.

[anandrajan]

My understanding of why mp3 support is crippled is because GPL apps can be freely redistributed whereas mp3 playback is licensed per device (unless Novell/SuSE pays mucho doubloons to Fraunhofer). So, the only way SuSE can fix this is to put a bunch of rpms on their website containing mp3 decoder binaries and tell you that using them may be illegal in your country. I think they've already done this.

Note that mp3 playback is actually NOT crippled since RealPlayer 10 is included (I know, I know, no flames please).

As someone who switched from Fedora Core 1 to SuSE 9.1, then 9.2, my opinion is that the easiest way to add all the missing packages is via apt/synaptic for SuSE and using the gwdg mirror. For more information, please visit http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/home.html.

This has worked flawlessly for me. I update the mp3/mpeg2/mpeg4 packages via synaptic and the rest of the packages via YOU. In YOU, the apt/synaptic packages are marked as "Protected" so that YOU does not update them. Not ideal mind you, but it works.

Re:Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3 in many ways.

[optimus2861]

Interesting -- there's good news and bad news in there if you're Canadian. The good news is that Canada seems to be among the countries that have issued the fewest patents to these guys. The bad news is the ones they did issue tend to be the newest; the applications look like they sat in the system for a long, long time before approval. The one for "Process for reducing frequency interlacing during acoustic or optical signal transmission and/or recording" (Canadian patent no. 2,118,915) went unapproved for ten years before being issued! (Application in 1992, issuance in 2002).

Portable digital music players play Ogg Vorbis.

[jbn-o]

Check out http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers for a wiki page on portable digital audio players that play Ogg Vorbis files.

What about the jukebox programs?

[Omni Magnus]

I would like to see either YAMMI or the jukebox plugins for XMMS included right out of the box.

The review may be excellent...

[IBeatUpNerds]

but the article sure sucks the big one.

This one is good: Installation is probably the hardest thing to cover in a Linux review. I mean, what can you really say about it? It either did the trick or it didn't.

First the guy says it's hard to cover. Then he goes on to compare it to one of two simple choices. Make up your mind, partner. Anyway, I'd rather not clutter up my rant with anything else on-topic.

Let me disclose that Suse is the only Linux distro that I really can't stand. I gave it a fair shot (~5 months). My installation was from the 9.1 pro CDs I bought for __90__ USD. Wow. What a freaking rip off. Slow as Christmas. Hands down, the absolute slowest Linux distro I've ever used. It took 2 fucking minutes to start YOU.

My favorite Suse bug was that every now and then, on my laptop, when I'd boot up, X would segfault. No decent reason why. strace didn't reveal fishy behavior. I upgraded to the latest Suse X package. No luck. Reboot a few times and it would suddenly work again. Never had any such problem outside of Suse.

My second favorite problem was that the Suse guys apparently modified something in the i810 RNG driver such that it would occasionally cause an Oops in an IRQ. Very stable, indeed.

I had other problems over the months, too. I always filed well written bugs with good information. Nothing ever came of it. I've put this machine through numerous versions of Slackware, Fedora, and Debian. Never, ever ,ever have I experienced any problems whatsoever outside of the 90 dollar copy of Suse. Fuck Suse. I hope Novell sells them and they go out of business.

Two good things: other than the fact that you had to watch a movie while waiting for them to load, Suse's configuration tools are the most complete and full-featured of any Linux distro I've ever used.

The two books that come with the Suse distro are pretty simplistic for an large-scale user, but they are very good for simple users. I referred to them a few times. Getting good printed docs with your OS always gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Re:The review may be excellent...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you and your computer just suck?

Where to get software not on the CDs?

[lanroth]

Thanks for the hint on where to get extra software not packaged on the CDs for 'licensing reasons'.

Check out the bottom of the this screenshot in the taskbar:
http://madpenguin.org/images/reviews/suse93/help.p ng
and you can see the reviewer has been browsing the alt.binaries.warez.linux news groups while writing the review!

Good review though ;-)

Review has been updated

[SilentBob4]

Mad Penguin has added an update to the review explaining that since the writing of the review, SUSE has made four patches available for the release which fix media support. They are apparently only on the EU mirrors though. They also made available a listing of the packages SUSE has patched, which is pretty extensive. You can find that list here. The final score was bumped up to 4/5 stars as well.