On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 21:03:40 -0500, Kyle Lagonegro (Student-Lagone37) <Lagone37@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > First off with these other disks, CD 3 and 4, I've commented on them and got a few responses, but I'm just curious as of what they are, and how do I use yum (or whatever I'm suppose to use) to put these programs on my computer. The easy/graphical way to do this is to go to your dektop menu Applications -> System Settings -> Add/Remove Applications. If you choose to install an application that's not installed it will know where to find it, and may prompt for a CD. yum is a command-line updater. You don't need to worry about it right at first, until you get a little more comfortable with Linux (coming from Windows I assume you'll stay in graphical mode for a while). When you're ready for the command line (which you SHOULD learn at some point), come back and we'll teach you yum. (the rumors are that FC4 will come bundled with a Yum graphical front-end) > Another thing I've been reading about OGG files instead of using MP3's. Ogg Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com/) is a great lossy format. It's also completely *free*, and it works under Windows too. Unless you're a picky audiophile, MP3 and OGG are more-or-less comparable both in file size and audio quality (although many would probably argue OGG is the better technical format, while MP3 is the most widely portable). However, there is a very important reason why almost no Linux distribution comes bundled with MP3 support. Despite what you might think, the MP3 format is patentend and requires royalty payments to use. Under Windows you don't realize this, because your software vendors have choosen to pay this fee for you. But, obviously, non-free software can't be legally bundled with a free operating system. You can, however, add additional software yourself which adds MP3 support, etc. If you can, re-encode your CDs directly into OGG, rather than trying to convert your existing MP3s. In Fedora, the easy way is to go to the desktop menu, Applications -> Sound & Video -> Sound Juicer CD Ripper It's default is to encode into OGG format. The only down side to OGG, is that it's not well supported in hardware devices (yet); such as in-car CD players, iPODs, etc. But it IS supported in most Windows MP3 software, so OGG is a great format for sharing the same files between Linux and Windows. > WMV (Which was obvious), MPG and AVI files all won't play, as of > now I think Helix is the only video playing program I have,... Fedora Core is rather light on video players. Again, most of this can be attributed to proprietary/patented video formats. Some of it is just the sheer size of the software. And it can be legally troublesome to bundle some of this into Fedora (you can't blame Linux). Supposedly the upcoming Fedora Extras discs will add much more software of this nature. But video support under Linux is possible. Perhaps the best all-around program is called Xine (http://xinehq.de/). It can do AVI, WMV, MPG, DVDs, and all kinds of video quite well. About the only thing it can't do is play video which is cryptographically restricted (with DRM licensing). It can however play DVDs without any worry about CSS encryption. Do some Googling. Xine isn't too hard to install, but it may be fairly complicated for a brand-new Linux newbie. Hope you have fun in the Linux world. -- Deron Meranda
