On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 04:36:37PM +0100, hantslug@??? wrote:
> So please, kind people:
>
> Can anyone give me advice on how to get radio 3, CDs, DVDs etc. playing in
> Etch?
>
I can't advise on Etch I'm afraid but for the most part what i am about to
say applies to Etch as much as Ubuntu Feisty.
Just to give you some hope. I unpacked a laptop late last night and first
thing I did was slip an Ubuntu feisty CD in. It installed just fine -
overwriting the legacy operating system underneath. I installed a bunch of
stuff from the repositories - no faffing with sources.list at all.
This included the stuff I "need" on a machine including :- vlc, mplayer,
flashplugin-nonfree, mozilla-mplayer, msttcorefonts, wine, dosbox,
sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin. This was all installed from
one apt-get, but equally would work using synaptic or aptitude as well.
I also applied all the latest updates and after a reboot I was done. Now I
can visit bbc.co.uk and listen again just works. Flash video works,
java works, I can play back pretty much any video using the mplayer plugin
in my browser for embedded video or vlc for video on my hard disk. I
will probably be adding w32codecs later but that isnt in the default repo.
I'm not bragging, just showing you that it _is_ possible to have a machine
up and running and doing all that good stuff you want in no time at all.
There were issues with my machine - wrong video resolution, and strange
frequency scaling, but these are specific to the video chipset and cpu in my
(brand new) machine. I have done the right thing and reported a bug for
these issues to see if they can be solved.
Much as I would love to come along to the meet and help you with Ubuntu
(or etch) to get you up and running I won't be able to due to prior
commitments.
No matter how much someone tells you that Ubuntu doesn't work, or that it's
not Debian, or RedHat or _whatever else_, it _can_ be made to work very
quickly and easily. The laptop on my desk is proof of that. There is no
special knowledge or skills you need, you don't need to be a major expert in
Debian or Ubuntu to do what I did. Ok, I knew the names of some of the
packages to install, but you can find that through synaptic. I did no
special config to get media playback working.
I would strongly recommend that if you tried it you should just forget any
methods you currently have for doing stuff and fall back to RTFMing. In my
opinion the Ubuntu wiki and help sites outclass the vast majority of
documentation for other distros (with the possible exception of the gentoo
wiki). It's in one place, is (for the most part) consistent, and generally
doesn't move. It has mistakes, but they all do.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats
is the first page I would consult, however installing the packages I listed
above will get you quite some way towards your media playing goal.
Cheers,
Al.
