Let me mention this one disclaimer. I’ve been a red hat fan for a long time. I’ve bought (yes paid money for linux) every version of Red Hat since 6.0 till then stopped their “desktop” product. I remeber some long drawn out battles regarding RPM’s and dependencies.
But that was then, this is now. Technology has gotten alot better, but Fedora is. A friend of mine wanted to go linux and he “liked” Fedora (never used it, he just liked it) — so FC4T2 was downloaded and installed on his machine (after some problems with the SATA which were fixed). Yea, its still a peice of shit. And I’m sorry, but RedHat and their over zelous “we refuse to support mp3’s” stance just fucks things up. The only way to play MP3’s on Fedora (with software pre-installed or that you can get on yum) is RealPlayer. They even fixed it so that XMMS wouldn’t work (with MP3’s).
Now don’t get me wrong, I love ogg as much as the next penguine hugger, and my friends has some ogg music — but MP3’s are still universal. The main stuff he does on his computer are: homework, download anime, watch anime & listen to music. He got BT working (great), we tried to get something to play the downloaded file — but every app claimed no support for AVI’s. Music? Well….. Real doesnt support playlists (at least the installed version) so it was a matter of dragging the files into real one at a time — dumb. And open office worked.
And yum started having sezures, up2date never worked, etc etc etc. We finally gave up — so I installed debian on his machine also. He mistakenly didnt select any of the normal options (desktop, fileserver, etc). So we apt-get’d kde, xfree86, and samba. It took a while to get everything setup (I finally figured out how to use xdebconfigurator — GREATEST THING EVER) — Now he’s up. He has Open Office, XMMS, BT, GAIM & Everything else he needs.
Debian strikes again!