Ubuntu

[kevomate66]

If Ubuntu played all the main media types out-of-the-box and my stupid wireless internet worked on it, I would have no use for Windows besides games.

[gore]

Moved to the right forum for some reason or another...

[nihil]

http://amarok.kde.org/ [You will need KDE]

Or

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Songbird

Media players are very much a matter of personal choice and one of the basic tenets of open source is freedom of choice.

If you want stuff that is dumbed down so it works straight out of the box then boot Windows or OS-X

Even then you may have problems with some non-store bought media and Windows.

and my stupid wireless internet worked on it

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...CardsSupported

If it's any consolation I have encountered similar problems with Vista. Fortunately most ISPs over here will send you an updated router for free.

[SirDice]

Simple solution, buy hardware you know is supported.

[keezel]

Simple solution, buy hardware you know is supported.

If the NIC is supported in windows, use ndiswrapper in ubuntu. Otherwise try to find a *nix driver.

[brokencrow]

If Ubuntu played all the main media types out-of-the-box...

Try VLC Player. It's ported to Linux.

"Hey, look Ma, no codecs!"

[SirDice]

Try VLC Player. It's ported to Linux.

"Hey, look Ma, no codecs!"

VLC seems to depend on QT these days

I'm sticking to MPlayer (no codecs needed either).

[gore]

I personally generally use Xine. It does everything I need it too for the most part, has nice themes to make it look nice, and you can change the interface to make it more easy to read the button and of course, make it easier to use, and plays all my videos without any problems, and can view images and other stuff, and as long as you set the "setup" thing to "Master of the known Universe" you can configure it any way you want.

On Slackware Linux and other non-company or whatever you want to call them Linux distros, you can play videos from any format without much problems.

SUSE DOES have a Xine you can use to watch your DVDs too, the only issue is that they can't put the version of Xine on the installation CDs because the codecs are proprietary and all that and so a company like Novell can't put them in there.

When they started doing that to prevent a lawsuit and whatnot, it took me all of a few minutes to look on Google and find the full version as a SUSE RPM that was easy to do. I opened up Yast2 and checked everything out, and typed rpm -U to upgrade even though I think it was a lower version number, and ended up with a version of Xine I could watch DVDs with and all that, and you need the DVDCSS thing too, but that came with it. Just grab that. I keep the version for SUSE in RPM format on my FTP server.

I have a machine here which was the very first computer I ever bought, still with the original 43 GB HD (Yes, 43) and popped in a 160 GB HD, set up Slackware (Used to be running SUSE Linux but because of the graphics card going to crap, I went with Slackware because I was testing out some stuff, and I ended up just keeping it Slackware) and right now I have a great back up solution with either Pure Ftp or VS FTP set up on my machine, and also SSH, and now I can upload and download whatever I want, which saved me a lot of time, because I have my whole CD collection almost ripped to MP3 at 128 KBps, and 320 KBps (128 for MP3 Players so I have room for more, 320 for play lists so I get better quality sound when size of file isn't a problem) and also as OGG Vorbis so I can listen to them that way too, and all the videos I have, configuration files, pictures, everything, all on my old box and then from there I can burn a CD back up for just in case and also I hooked up my USB ZIP Drive 100 MB ZIP disks to it so I can back up to those even though rarely anyone uses those now with the invention of USB Thumb Drives, and also a USB HD that has 80 GBs on it so I can back up to that too, and Slackware handles all that and more with almost 200 days uptime.

[zszafran]

Normally the first thing I do with a new ubuntu install is a "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras" which installs a lot of media codecs (dvd and so forth) as well as a lot of gstreamer packages for audio on top of other things. This will also install java6 jre, some ms fonts, some flash plugins and other packages. This is a pretty good package to install before you actually start using the os as a desktop.