On Thursday 03 May 2007, hantslug@??? wrote:
> Frequently on this list various young* men say that the only thing
> now that they cannot do on Linux is serious gaming. So, please -
> how? I have spent enough hours to have been becoming utterly
> ridiculous (and very annoying to the young man concerned) trying to
> get Radio 3 working usably, never mind getting CDs, DVDs, camera
> etc. working.
>
> The initial problems: an old monitor and a box with only a SATA
> drive present (no IDE at all). Both these were installed OOTB this
> time. (Tho' the resolution could be better.) I had taken Etch,
> CentOS 5 and two versions of Feisty to try. I tried Etch first -
> and we appeared to have lift-off. Everything was great until I came
> to multimedia and now I have ground to a complete halt. I have
> installed numerous varieties of Realplayer, Acrobat Reader,
> flashplayer and Java and have tried Firefox (Iceweasel), Konqueror
> and Opera. Still the BBC website will not play music acceptably.
> I have googled, read what I could find - Radio 3 still plays so
> jerkily it is impossible to listen to. On my long-in-the-tooth
> Libranet 3 it plays OOTB (itis doing so now).
>
> So please, kind people:
>
> Can anyone give me advice on how to get radio 3, CDs, DVDs etc.
> playing in Etch?
>
> Alternatively, can anyone vouch that $DISTRIBUTION can, OOTB,
> handle: an old monitor (Visionmaster Pro 501 I think it is), a box
> containing no IDE drives, a Vivitar camera (a need for a card
> reader would be acceptable) and all the usual - which seem fine on
> almost anything. I am even desperate enough to try XP, but I don't
> know whether it could handle the lack of IDE drive either.
>
> I tried Etch first of this month's crop of new releases purely
> because it is the one I am most familiar with administering in
> general. I am not wedded to it.
>
> TIA
> Lisi
> *i.e. under about 55
If multimedia is the requirement, you may find the dyne:bolic live CD
what you want (from
www.dynebolic.org). There's a new version out
(2.4) which also has all sorts of recovery disk stuff (like qtparted)
on so it's worth having around anyway. You can install (nest/dock) it
inside any HDD partition with 650MB spare and then it runs from disk
rather than CD without affecting the original OS and uses unionfs to
preserve any changes you make. It comes with everything from audio
and video streaming through to a recent version of cinelerra and
works on fairly ancient hardware like my 128MB, 600MHz ThinkPad (a
previous version even works on an Xbox). The blurb from their home
page: It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning them into a
full media stations: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb
RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console - and if you have
more than one, you can easily do clusters.
Everyone should have one!
ATB, Peter
