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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."
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.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
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.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
If removing mp3 further cripples their multimedia support, what is already missing?
mpeg4 and DVD playback
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.
One man's selflessness is another man's annoyance.
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.
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.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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
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.
Digital Citizen
Thanks for the hint on where to get extra software not packaged on the CDs for 'licensing reasons'.
p ng
;-)
Check out the bottom of the this screenshot in the taskbar:
http://madpenguin.org/images/reviews/suse93/help.
and you can see the reviewer has been browsing the alt.binaries.warez.linux news groups while writing the review!
Good review though