They were both CDs of the same size. I am not sure why Mandriva is so slow. I install lots of distros and this on the slow end and Ubuntu is on the fast extreme. Ubuntu has worked hard to make installation a breeze. One great thing that Ubuntu and all of its derivatives does in addition to the fast and flexible installation is it allows you to set it up and walk away until the job is done. In contrast many other distros require that you stay at the computer or some set up the installation and then require you to finish it at the end by adding user name and passwords. In Ubuntu this is all done up front. Fedora does a similar thing but you have to add your user name and password when you re-boot. Some distros such as Mandriva make installation more painful than it needs to be. I encourage people to try other distros. If we are locked in to one distro them we don't know what others offer that is different. For me it is a smorgasbord. I love the choice. My loyalty to any distro only goes so far as that it serves my purposes. Shallow maybe, but that is the way I approach things. I started with Mandrake, switched to Fedora, switched to MEPIS, then switched to Ubuntu. In between each decision was lots of shopping around. Everybody has his or her own take on things. It all depends on you, the way you work and how much time you can devote to the learning curve. Easy is good. Too easy is worse. Too hard is just as bad. There is a trade off that comes with ease and control. That's why Ubuntu works for most people. It is easy, but no too easy. It offers lots of options and control, but not at the expense of taking all of your time. You only discover these things by trying lots of distros. The other thing that Ubuntu brings is lots of choice. You can run any conceivable desktop and on almost any architecture. Many people are critical of all of the *buntus, but it is because someone has taken the time to give us more choice. I like Mandriva. I have a soft spot for it due to it being my first big distro. It is on its way back after many people wrote it off. Other distros on the rise besides Ubuntu and its kin are OpenSUSE, Mint (based on Ubuntu and worth a look), and gOS (also based on Ubuntu). Fedora is either on the decline or stable depending on who you talk to. Sadly, Gentoo, PCLOS and MEPIS are on the decline. Slackware and Debian have their niches and don't go through the cycles that many distros do. Linspire is dead and Xandros is only a factor due to the eeePC. Check out Distrowatch.org for distros, but don't give too much credence to their stats which are based on page hits and not downloads or installations.
Roy Linux: Fast, friendly, flexible and .... free! Support Open source. <*,)}}+< Only dead fish go with the flow! ----- Original Message ---- From: j j <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, October 6, 2008 10:00:35 PM Subject: Re: [LINUX_Newbies] error message trying to get DVD's to play On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 3:01 PM, Linux Canuck <linuxcanuck@ yahoo.ca> wrote: > Install vlc. It works better anyway. thanks roy. i'll give this a try. > Mandriva and any RPM based distro is > prone to breakage. RPMs do not trace dependencies as well as Debs. We can > argue that point but that is my experience and that of many people. It is > just a question of time before things start to break and not work on any RPM > based distro IMI. Count yourself lucky that you got this far. As long as you > are into re-installing you might want to consider switching to a Debian > based distro such as Ubuntu, Debian, MEPIS or any one of the others. > well, this will give me a little more incentive to try ubuntu which i've been interested in trying for some time now. > If you are okay with RPMs and like Mandriva, you might want to install > Mandriva One 2008. I have used it and it works better than 2007. Just be > prepared for a long installation. Mine took 2 and a half hours. Ubuntu > installs in less than half an hour on the same system. wow! did these 2 distros install the same packages or did mandriva install more software, which would account for the time discrepancy? when i had this problem, and decided to finally do a re-install, i did consider mandriva 2008, but realized that it too is an old version now and thought that 2009 would be coming out soon. so i decided to just do the install of 2007 and download 2009 after it comes out rather than spend the time doing 2 downloads. > ....... > > Just a thought. The easiest solution is to try vlc. > > Roy > thanks again for the response, it gives me a direction and is much appreciated. j __________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now at http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from this list, please email [EMAIL PROTECTED] & you will be removed.Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
