On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 09:41:35 +0100 M. Fioretti wrote: > On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 16:45:00 PM -0800, John Jason Jordan > ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > > > Having said all that, my recommendations for a beginner are Ubuntu > > and Fedora. > > Not Fedora. Besides hardware/multimedia support and easyness of
[snip] > Absolutely. Not to mention that the problem the OP will have or not > with OpenOffice on Linux won't depend on the choice of distribution. > Most of those codecs are illegal in many countries due to copyright issues. libmp3lame for MP3 is an example [quote source="http://lame.sourceforge.net/tech-FAQ.txt";] LAME, as the name says, is *not* an encoder. LAME is a development project which uses the open source model to improve MP3 technology. Many people believe that compiling this code and distributing an encoder which uses this code would violate some patents (in the US, Europe and Japan). However, *only* a patent lawyer is qualified to make this determination. The LAME project tries to avoid all these legal issues by only releasing source code, much like the ISO distributes MP3 "demonstration" source code. [/quote] Which is doublespeak for "we get around the law our way, good luck to you if you use it". AFAIK Mint is the only linux distro which includes all these codecs on the disk. -- Michael All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well - Julian of Norwich 1342 - 1416 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
