W32Codecs - Howto

I recently needed to come to the rescue of one of our club members the other day having some trouble playing some video content, so thought I would spell out what you need to add to get things working properly for both 32bit and 64bit systems for Jaunty Jackalope. Having the Flash Plugin now working on 32bit Firefox is great in Jauty Jackalope and only requires the installation of ubuntu-restricted-extras.

I first heard about this distro on Linux Outlaws podcast, checked out the EEE user forums and found poeple had got it installed on their Asus EEE's, so I decided to download and install on my 701. This is what the official website has to say about Crunchbang :-

"CrunchBang Linux" is an Ubuntu based distribution featuring the lightweight Openbox window manager and GTK+ applications. The distribution has been built and customised from a minimal Ubuntu install. The distribution has been designed to offer a good balance of speed and functionality."

Mint - Felicia version 8.10 RC1

Introduction

As many of you will know, recently Ubuntu released its latest operating system and at the time of writing this review the latest Ubuntu offering was that of Intrepid Ibex version "8.10" Mint latest offering towards the Ubuntu flavours is known as "Felicia" so thought it useful to take a look at the Mint Gnome version or version "8.10".

Mint Distro

Introduction 32Bit

Mint is a distro - German of course - that has a wonderful appeal about it, although not a Ferrari it certainly looks as good as one, perhaps a better analogy would be a BMW, a masterpiece of German engineering thats Mint not the car. Most Linux distro's are derivatives and Mint is no exception it is Debian based ie "Ubuntu", one of Ubuntu criticisms is that whilst it works very well, is stable and reliable it just does not have great looks. Mint does have looks and really good one at that, it has a certain wow factor which appeals to many, it also has many of the features from the box that many spend time and effort to install on other flavours.

Like a lot of people I have at least one old pc kicking around in the loft, so I decided to put it to better use than gathering dust and install some linux on it! I have a home network and have never got round to buying a router for it, instead relying on pc to share the internet connection. This started out many years ago with an old 486 running or should I say crawling Windows 98, but all it had to do was route the traffic and it did remarkably well. A few years on and a couple more PC's on the network this had to be replaced.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

Ubuntu.com Live CD and Installation on one 700Mb disk Version 7.10 is another great advance for the first time in this distro version we have Eye Candy already installed by default. Ok it's subtle and you may not notice at first any changes but it is different, with a better graphics card such as NVidia or ATI sometimes the Eye Candy is even more remarkable.

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

Ubuntu.com Live CD and Installation on one 700Mb disk Version 7.04 was the best Version so far installation was indeed simple and little had changed or needed to from previous installer again this nearly installed on all hardware presented, including now the laptop's it's ability to detect hardware remained the same and only lacked on very new hardware, network connectivity where on PC Desktops flawless (The newer hardware as for the Dell Precision presented a bigger problem to overcome but this used both SATA and a

Ubuntu Version 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) (Dapper Drake)

Ubuntu.com Available as a two CD Set the Live CD version and Installable Version Version 6.06 was a great advance on it's predecessor Version 5.10 installation was much simpler and nearly installed on any hardware presented, it's ability to detect hardware and more importantly the network where also greatly improved. Distribution Upgrade from version 5.10 to Version 6.06 was abysmal and failed on all units that we tried them on.

Ubuntu Version 5.10 (Breezy Badger)

Ubuntu.com Available as a two CD Set the Live CD version and Installable Version This was for all intense and purposes SoSLUG's first introduction to Mark Shuttleworths Linux concept and we loved it. Our original path was to install Gentoo onto our systems this we did with our and the MediaShed servers however this was never a viable option for our limited desktop systems. Ubuntu had everything we needed except suitable printer and shockwave flash support,

Ubuntu Distributions

Ubuntu in our eyes has very much been a success story as far as we are concerned SoSLUG and the MediaShed then called the Jelliedeel Shed having had donated to it a number of redundant computers and screens for a "Grow Your Own Media Lab" hosted by Access Space in Sheffield and hosted by James Wallbank a Linux Lab was setup covering a three day period to introduce the concept of extending the life of old or redundant computers, these same computers would normally destined for land fill sites.