The Next Leap for Linux

> I'm entitled to one crab!

TC, if we ever meet in person, I'll try to buy you a whole bucket. :) Do you prefer hard or soft shelled?

> I'm entitled to one crab!

Absolutely. There are times when crabbiness makes the world go round.

Besides, who can stand the thought of universal smiliness?

Makes my skin crawl.

jdixon, as long as they're cooked and not fighting back, they're all good!

I tried to keep it on track,

I tried..

> I tried..

We know Scott. No one blames you.

>No one blames you.

I blame him. For everything.

> I blame him.

Well, no one who matters. :)

I was going to take issue with NYT's "difficult to install and set up" comments, but the 2.6 kernel has been a roller-coaster since about 2.6.8, what with udev and hotplug and network manager, and zeroconf having nothing to conf, and sound and video going bonkers, and other key subsystems like wireless and init getting flung into woodchippers and re-written.

So. Never mind.

I thought this quote was strange:

"When you run that program you get an ominous warning that downloading and installing “non-free codecs without paying a fee to the concerned authorities constitutes a CRIME in the United States of America.” Users in the United States are advised: “please do not install option AUD-DVD.” Users who ignore that legal warning can then configure Ubuntu to play commercial DVDs."

He didn't mention CNR, which does work with Ubuntu. It doesn't seem to work perfectly yet, but I did use it to get codecs.

Plus, Linux users in the US can get legal, open source codecs for their DVD's through Fluendo.

>I blame him. For everything.

As well you should!!

LOL!!

> He didn't mention CNR, which does work with Ubuntu. It doesn't seem to work perfectly yet, but I did use it to get codecs.

It's been my experience that whenever the NYT runs a story that is not well aligned with their editorial opinion, which is a nice way of saying that they don't like it but they can't directly lie about it in this case, they "damn with faint praise".

It's not just Linux. The NYT doesn't run stories about self defense with firearms, how the Federal Reserve inflates the money supply, the failures of central planning, etc. Even my first post in this thread, that the NYT would never print a story about how Dr. Paul _could_win_ has not been disproven. I am on the border of surprise to see that they mention Paul as a presidential candidate _at_all_.

So the "obscure" fact that there are indeed legal codecs for Linux didn't make it into the story, while the dire warning in big capital letters did.

"All the news that's fit to print, as long as we get to decide what is fit."

Quoting:Plus, Linux users in the US can get legal, open source codecs for their DVD's through Fluendo.

Are you saying that individual users can download them but distros can't distribute them?

If distros can distribute them, I wonder why they are not including them in their releases. May be they are. I wouldn't know since I have no DVD and never bothered to look.

> Are you saying that individual users can download them but distros can't distribute them?

Only the MP3 is free from Fluendo. You have to pay for the others. The new opensuse supposedly points users to Fluendo when they can't play a file. The distributions themselves are not able to distribute codecs.

The next version of Ubuntu has plug and play printers (I have been putting in debugging reports so you can blame me if it doesn't work properly ;-)). Till Kamppeter of Mandrake fame has done the work. Should be interesting to see the reaction of the NYT to that will be. A few distro versions back CUPS was pretty shakey on Ubuntu. Seems much improved now.

I saw something to the effect that Ubuntu Gutsy will eliminate the need for Automatix. If it can somehow get all the codecs in there for audio and video and do a good job on autoconfiguration of wireless, that will be huge.

Printing was shaky on Ubuntu because Ubuntu devs broke it. They disabled the CUPS web interface for "security" reasons, and disabled network sharing of printers. (And yet avahi-daemon and Bluetooth are enabled by default- ahem.) So users were left with the Gnome printer manager, which was lacking a lot of features like network printing, or the KDE printer manager, which never did work right on Kubuntu, and would spit out "cannot contact the CUPS server" messages whenever you tried to do anything.

So us ace geeks helped meeelyuns of buntu users turn the CUPS web interface back on, and enable printer sharing. CUPS works great all by itself, including auto-detection of both local and network printers- why would anyone want to mess with it?

Once I figured out the "secret" of CUPS, at least in my weird-ass networking setup at work, I found much new love for CUPS.

My secret? the Administration button. When my favorite printer doesn't automatically come up, I hit Administration, and presto, there it is.

>My secret? the Administration button.

Tis a wonderful thing. I've embarrassed a Windows guy or two by printing out to network printers long before they were even sorted out.

Even though Apple uses CUPS and now owns it, I've had way more trouble with printing through OS X than I have ever had in Linux.