Mplayerplug-in: It Just Works.
Wow. I just
realized something - I'm an Open Source Nut. I've graduated from
Advocate to total fanboy. My walls at work have the Business
Week with
Linus in
a Penguin Suit on it, the Firefox
ad we put in
the New York Times and
two Oracle-on-Linux ads. My white-board even has a crappy drawing of tux
on it.
That said, I'm still rational and clear-headed about using what works. Although I run Linux at home, I'm fully aware that Sara basically just puts up with it because she loves me. There's just too many times when it should "just work" and I've got to tweak things to make them do what they should. It's not quite ready for the average "mouse-only" user.
The main place where this is evident is surfing the web. Yes, Firefox is great, but on Linux, good plugins are hard to come by. Apple and Microsoft have a vested interest in keeping their media formats to themselves, and I don't think we'll be seeing Quicktime for Linux or Microsoft Linux Media Player anytime soon. Thankfully, Macromedia and Real are putting out fantastic plugins for Linux, so at least for now, their formats are easy to play. We'll see what happens now that Adobe has bought Macromedia.
Mplayer to the rescue for the rest
Last night I installed mplayerplug-in, which handles any media that the full-fledged mplayer handles (just about anything) and it's amazing.Installing was as simple as apt-get install mplayerplug-in on Fedora+atrpms. Be sure to follow the "for firefox" directions at the bottom of the mplayerplug-in page)
cp mplayerplug-in.xpt /usr/lib/firefox/components
Restart mozilla
With flash, realplayer (which is great on Linux now!), and mplayerplug-in, the browser finally "just works" on Linux, and I'm a happy camper.
Linux is one step closer to being seriously "wife" friendly.
