Dear Fedora Advocates,
My brother in law will be returning from Iraq
in another couple of months and one of the things
I am doing for him is to build him a computer. He
is not technically adept and his computer activity
is pretty much limited to looking at his email on yahoo and a little web surfing. Sometimes he
prints an email or two.
I am vacillating on building an FC3 machine or a W2k machine.
First, Windows 2000 is obsolete even by Microsoft standards. They will sell you a Windows XP license, which costs much more. Worse yet, Windows XP is very resource-hungry in comparison to any distribution of Linux, or even in comparison to Windows 2000.
Second, having plug-ins for every kind of multimedia file one might encounter is highly over-rated. True enough, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) still has not been ported to Linux. Equally true, much of the sound content on the Web is in the form of MP3 files, and MP3 is not an open-source protocol. (Actually, however, RealPlayer 10 for Linux will play MP3's without a hitch, since RealPlayer paid the freight for an MP3 license.) But your friend has to ask himself whether "a little Web surfing" will necessarily include every kind of sound file that's published.
Third, you can get plug-ins for Mozilla and Firefox very easily--at Mozilla's own site, or from the FreshRPMS, Dag, Dries, and AT repositories. (You can also point to the Livna repository, but its apps aren't built from the same source code as those on the others, so Livna doesn't mix well with the others.)
All of which is to say that you're better off going with Fedora Core and /especially/ FC3.
Now I wouldn't so much say /no/ need for anti-virus software. Instead I would suggest that you install ClamAV, the open-source anti-virus solution for GNU/Linux and similar platforms. I use it myself. Of course, Linux is a lot easier to secure from viruses than MS Windows ever will be. You can get ClamAV from any of the popular repositories.
You can obtain the Java Runtime Environment directly from Sun Microsystems, or from a Fedora-compatible repo. The first alternative would let you get the latest version.
As for codecs to play most Windows-compatible multimedia files: Install mplayer, or the Linux Movie Player, and then follow this link:
http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/falsehope/home/rathann/apt/7.3/RPMS.stable/mplayer-codecs-win32-2.0-1.i386.html
It has a link to download an RPM that will install all the codecs you need. Then again, there's another link somewhere out there that has a tar-ball for installing those codecs--more on tar-balls below.
The best thing to do, then, is:
1. Install FC3.
2. Configure Firefox for Web pages and Thunderbird for e-mail.
3. Search Google on the following key words: dag, dries, freshrpms, at-stable, livna, gstreamer, and fedora.us. Most of these repos will give you specific lines to configure the file yum.conf and the file sources in etc/sysconfig/rhn, so that you can use up2date and/or yum to keep your applications up to date, and use yum to find new packages. (Go to http://fedoranews.org/tchung/gyum/fc3/ and learn how to get a Graphical User Interface front-end for yum, written especially for Fedora.)
All of these repos offer apt, the package-transfer system developed originally for Debian and then rewritten for RPM packages for the Conectiva distribution and now available for all RPM-based distros.
Apt works with a GUI-based front-end called Synaptic that lets you see at a glance which packages are available in the repositories you set up--but yum will let you set the machine up to fetch and install updates /automatically/ either every morning when you start up, or every night if you leave the machine on 24x7.
And to answer your basic question: Yes, you /can/ obtain plug-ins and other applications in a small number of places. The days where you had to chase all over the Net to find all the apps you need are long gone.
So you install an additional package-management system, either yum or apt, and configure a few repositories for yum or apt to search for new packages and updates.
Then you can fetch just about anything you need, either from the repositories or directly from some of the developers.
In the extreme cases, you can fetch the tar-balls and build your extra applications right on the system. Advantage: as long as you have the gcc compiler family and the linker (gmake), you can build anything, and when you do, you get a custom build for your hardware. Disadvantage: time-consuming and a slightly steeper learning curve.
Good luck!
Temlakos
