Fedora vs Mandrake vs Suse: Linux Distros Compared

[lug at the-leveys.us (Don Levey)]

 wrote:
> I had the same problem with xmms. My conclusion was that they shipped
> xmms with the mp3 section deliberately broken so as not to get into
> some kind of copyright trouble. That's just my guess, I didn't
> research that. I ended up pulling down the source tarball or mp3
> codec, can't remember, but that fixed it. I've now trashed that
> install.
>
> On Tuesday 06 July 2004 19:52, Grant M wrote:
>> I would have, but I had already made a bunch of changes to see if it
>> would be capable of service as a production workstation (tunnel X
>> and TCP over SSH, setup all the network services, setup my print
>> spoolers that I could never get working under RedHat), so I really
>> didn't want to have to go through it again. Just as an FYI, I used
>> RedHat 9 pro for over a year, and I enjoyed it except that I had
>>   these problems with it: o Could never get XMMS to work at all
>>   o Evolution stopped retrieving email after a time
>>   o Netscape was just too damn slow over IMAP
>>   o Thunderbird was ok, but stopped accepting keyboard input
>>   o Shortly after Thunderbird, Firefox also stopped responding
>>
>> At that point, I could no longer retrieve my email, so that's when
>> Suse began to look interesting. Grant M.
>>

RedHat (and perhaps other US-based distributions) does not distribute the
MP3 plug-in for XMMS, etc.  This is specifically to avoid copyright
problems, as the MP3 format is patented.  They do make it possible to easily
add the plug-in, which is freely available offshore.

I believe a similar position is held for playing DVDs.  I was able to get
what I needed for MP3s and DVDs for my Fedora machine.

 -Don