When I upgraded my desktop Linux machine to Red Hat 8.0, one of my two favorite apps, xmms, stopped working. My old playlists were gone, and the program refused to let me play individual mp3s, much less a whole directory. Bad, because I've ripped hundreds of CDs to my Linux machine, and equipped it with a pair of very good amplified speakers.

Since I've spent a good part of 2 days trying to fix my hacked Linux DNS server and configuring a replacement, I had renewed confidence, so I decided to research why my xmms player had failed. (Needless to say, over in Mac land, iTunes was taking very good care of matters musical).

After much Googling, How-To-ing and tutorialing, I found a post at Bugzilla: Red Hat 8.0 removed support for mp3... so xmms doesn't know what to do with mp3s until you download a plug-in.

Red Hat removed mp3 support from 8.0? What? And where was that data point published? I'm sure, if I was a close, daily reader of the Linux press, I'd have picked that up... but I'm not. And I can't imagine why an OS that was trying to become mainstream would drop support for one of the most popular file formats. Will jpg go away next? html?

The point is, I hate to feel stupid, especially when it's an inanimate object that makes it so. I think an awful lot of people think the same way. Linux is already tough, but arbitrariness, and just plain bad, non-user-centric decision-making makes it a non-starter. Judging by comments at Bugzilla and elsewhere, I wasn't the only one who was dumbfounded by this particular move (I have since learned that Red Hat balked at paying licensing fees for the format - one reviewer called it 'Open Source Puritanism').

I may be a bit more technically literate than the the median computer user, (I did, after all, just set up BIND from scratch from the command line, and the images here were captured and processed via GIMP). But, I just don't have time to devote my life to the arcania and whims of even the mainstream Linux distro. I honestly hope that pointing out the obvious helps... for me, Mac OS X is very close to being the best *NIX... if it just ran on cheap hardware...
Comments 9:11:37 PM    

Yesterday we peeked inside the predecessor magellan after it had been hacked and discovered many hardware woes along with with the hack. Two fans were out, including the power supply... it may be time to harvest the RAM (maybe) and HDs and move up to new hardware (there is a 500 MHz K6 around here somewhere...).

But, stepson John's old (original 266-MHz Bondi-blue) iMac was just sitting there (he got a new iMac for Xmas). There are a couple of good articles on setting up BIND on Mac OS X (turns out the config files from the Linux boxes worked fine). And it's really cool to listen to iTunes while you work on DNS config, on the same box...
Comments 6:02:40 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures