Fedora desktop with Dust theme and Murrine svn gtk engine
Running Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop I enjoyed it’s Dust theme a lot - not officially part of Ubuntu 8.10, but you can get it here. So I wanted to install it on my desktop machine running Fedora 10.
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Switching from mp3 to ogg
When it comes to multimedia software most Linux distributions have one thing in common: no proprietary codecs - and this might include MP3 playback. I have no deeper insights in the license terms of the MP3 codec, but there is a whole website about it by THOMPSON, the company claiming to control MP3 licensing: mp3licensing.com. There are other proprietary codecs as well, i.e. “aac” which I think is the default file format for Apple’s iTunes and devices by Nokia and Sony. Wouldn’t it be nice to not care about this crap? The open source alternative is “ogg vorbis”, providing great quality audio files and high compression at the same time. So, how can you switch from mp3 to ogg?
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WBT-201 & Fedora 10 (building RPMs)
Of course I wanted my Wintec WBT-201 gps logging device to work with Fedora as it did with Debian/Ubuntu (see this post). And after playing around a little it finally did.
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Installing and configuring Fedora 10
I still like Debian and Debian based distros like sidux or Ubuntu most, but - as always, if something works too well - I want something new… As I recently joined a training course at Red Hat and a new release of Fedora just hit the ftp servers, I went for Fedora 10.
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Debian with lame, mencoder, transcode, xvid & dvd::rip
Debian has one of the largest software repositories around but also has a very strict policy (which I respect) when it comes to legal stuff concerning free software or copyrights. I guess this is the reason why some multimedia software packages are missing. If you stick with Debian you have to install them manually, or - if you want the easy way - you could of course add some third party respositories or change for example to Ubuntu which doesn’t seem to share Debian’s concerns. As I’m running sidux (which is based on Debian Sid) I wanted to go for the manual installation (I don’t like to add repositories other than Debian’s). Debian comes with an MPlayer package but it lacks menconder. If you need menconder you’ll have to install from sources. lame, transcode, xvid and dvd::rip are not part of Debian repositories at all, so we’ll have to install them from sources, too. In this HOWTO I’ll explain how this worked for me (running sidux on amd64). I guess it should be similar to Debian testing or even stable.
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