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New Releases for Debian and SUSE
linuxbeta writes "With the recent SUSE LINUX 9.3 Live DVD ISO released, we get a sneak peek. (screenshots) of this much anticipated OS update. Cool updates in 9.3 includes Firefox 1.0, OpenOffice.org 2.0, Gimp 2.2, Beagle. Xen, VoIP client, and more." And while Debian's Sarge isn't here yet (give Branden Robinson a chance to find his plush new office!), wrochal points out that the fifth update to Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 ("Woody" ) has arrived. 3.0 (r5) "mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems." Also, four packages were removed, three for license violations.
OpenOffice 2.0????? Isn't it in beta still?
According to debian.org the reason for removing the other package was: "Program doesn't work anymore".
I guess that's an acceptable reason.
I got Suse 9.3 Friday after ordering from Novell.com 2 weeks ago.
mp3s work out of the box using Juk.
I watch DVDs using MPlayer which I installed using the apt port for Suse.
There are 4 mulitmedia packs you can download from Suse using Yast.
Understand?
This guy is way out there
A roaming profile tool came out with 9.2 and is still with 9.3. Update your system.
This guy is way out there
Join the torrent
torrent link
my post on torrents
Right on brother. And here are the facts that no one in the Suse camp wants to face up to:
1) Turbolinux, a distribution with a lot less mindshare and less money can afford to ship you a legal DVD player for $69 but somehow Novell cannot do so?
1a) Unless you are a corporate buyer, you see HP's Suse notebook comes preloaded with PowerDVD.
2) Slide two of the Suse silliness presentation is not that they not ship multimedia codecs out of the box. If that were our only problem. Debian, Red Hat and Mandrake do not ship libdvdcss or any of the other codecs, but once you add them, your existing Totem or Kaffeine players play.
2a) But no, Suse has to go way beyond what's required and actually goes into the source code for Xine and Kaffeine and cripples so that even if you add the missing codecs/libraries, it still will not play.
2b) So what do you do? You have to remove kaffeine, xine, xine-libs ad nauseam and then install apt-get and install those programs from a third-party and hope that it doesn't break anything else. Why is this bad?
Because you no longer get updates for those packages from Suse and because mixing apt and yast sources can often leave your system in an inconsistent state.
All of this is a damn shame, because Suse is an awesome distribution with some stupid, stupid, stupid policies that have no legal or logical basis.
Hopefully, this long response will serve as a permanent rebuttal to all of the Suse fanboys. Liking a distribution should not be tantamount to giving them carte blanche to screw you over.
Summary of facts:
1) Suse ships DVD-playing software whenever the hell it pleases it.
2) Other distributions manage to ship a dvd player for $69, yet Suse costs $85-99 or more.
3) Suse cripples standard libraries and thus has disqualified itself from the home market. I will not touch it for these reasons and I have stopped recommending it to friends and clients.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Do you know what these license violations were? The links to the packages are all broken, presumably because the packages have been removed.
Yes, the reasons are listed here at the very bottom: http://people.debian.org/~joey/3.0r5/
> Can Linspire play DVDs? Why, yes. It can play
> DVD's. What's more, the Linsoire DVD player is
> Xine. Some how, little Linspire has managed to
> figure out how to legally play MP3's and DVD's.
So? It is exactly as I've said - you need to pay for it. They bought paid licenses for DVD support and distribute closed/propertiary version. And you need to pay for it. So what exactly is your point?
In addition to being copyright infringement, these proprietary codecs don't work on non-i386-based platforms. One of the hallmarks of FLOSS is portability. I think it's a good thing that I can give someone a copy of an Ogg Vorbis file and not have to care what hardware they're using because I know it's likely that there's a program to play the audio file on their computer. Now, even portable digital audio players play Ogg Vorbis files, so people can hear high-quality compressed audio without being near their computer.
This is part of the reason why I'm anxiously awaiting Dirac and why I'm reading the Theora spec. I want to be able to point to a complete and competitive FLOSS codecs which are genuinely useful for movies.
We also ought to promote the use of these codecs and not be so eager to distribute copies of files encoded with proprietary or patent-encumbered codecs.
Digital Citizen
Here's a torrent for SuSE 9.3. Go swarm happy!
Ubuntu can potentially take the lead to create a one disk desktop distribution and the basis for some customised Debian distributions on three or four platforms. Debian provides infrastructure on 11 architectures and a wider selection of packages, some of which Ubuntu choose to mirror in their universes. Both distributions need the other to some extent and there is no particular "one size fits all" mentality for either of them.
"Ubuntu (Sarge in disguise)"
I think you mean Sid in disguise.
If the dvd is data, that's a moot point. If the dvd is video, then it depends on whether or not they used any encryption for the disc. The only time you really need special apps like decss is to decrypt encrypted video dvds.
That particular error isn't very user friendly ;-) Come on the xen-devel list (see http://lists.xensource.com) and we may be able to sort you out. Alternatively, someone on #xen at OFTC may be able to help.
Gentoo has had a ximian openoffice in portage for a while. It uses the openoffice source with some added patches. I'm not sure how one would get this working without portage, but it may be a good starting point.
Keep in mind though, you need over 4gb of free disk space just to compile the darn thing. But I'll admit it looks nicer and integrates better into KDE.