Linux: Windows Media Support part2

I was talking to a friend at work about my problem with WMV files and he said that MPlayer does play them it just doesn't have a file association by default. It does work, sometimes giving an error but still playing the file.

Linux: Windows Media Support

Ya, I never thought I would say this, but man I miss having Windows Media support. It seems like all the websites I normally go to all use Windows Media for video and it's starting to piss me off. When and if I do the official switch, I'll have to install a Virtual Windows on Linux just to have access to things I can't access in Linux. : (

Linux hell

For a programmer, I don't really have a powerful machine (AMD Athlon 1.3, 256 MB ram) so running windows is not always interesting and after getting infected yet again by spyware I decided to try Linux.

At first I thought, lets run it thru VMWare and see if it's cool or not, it's going to be easy... Famous last words. I started this last Sunday and pretty much every day since I've been trying all kinds of linux and none worked. I was starting to be discourage. Friday I decided to install it directly on a little 20 GB hard drive I had. I disabled my two other disk with windows so not to do too much damage. :)

I had Mandrake and Red Hat 9. Mandrake gave me some problems so it ended up being Red Hat. Now I'm no expert of linux and Red Hat did install itself easily. By yesterday morning, I had finally installed a Linux system.

I soon discovered that you still need to install a lot of things that you think would be already included like, MP3 support. Now I've never played with Linux before so installing something was kinda new. The first thing I did was get Firefox and that was pretty easy, just like installing on Windows. Next thing was get MP3 support and thats when I realized that Linux is not all nice and dandy. The first thing I got was the sources... After getting them untarred, I didn't really know what to do with them. I found out reading on the internet how to make the files. I then found out about RPM files. Ahh already it was easier to understand and install.

After getting MP3 support, the other thing was getting XVid support. So looking on the internet found out that the MPlayer was quite popular. I get the RPM and try to install, oops, it looks like I need another library. I finally end up getting like 6 other RPM files. Got that working. I later discovered APT, a program that gets all the needed files for programs and installs them. :)

After a week, I can now say, Windows has nothing to be afraid of, Linux is not ready to over the home market. My grandmother has enough problems getting around Windows, theres no way Linux is even a possibility!

I will keep my record of my Linux experiences up to date. I also hope to have some code that I did a while back up here for you all.

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog about computers and programming. In this blog I will post some code and my thoughts on the programming world.