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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."
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.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
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 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.
Digital Citizen
I would like to see either YAMMI or the jukebox plugins for XMMS included right out of the box.
but the article sure sucks the big one.
,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.
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
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.
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