Life without Windows

[Lee Revell]

On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 01:02 +0800, Jerome Gotangco wrote:
> >From the Philippines: a journalist writes about using Ubuntu instead of Windows:
> 
> Ubuntu, a user-friendly version of Linux, has been running so nicely
> on my home personal computer that I decided to do an experiment. I
> wrote down a list of tasks I normally do with Windows XP and decided
> to see how many of them I could do on Linux.
> 

"To play music and videos, Ubuntu comes with a number of multimedia
players. For MP3 files, I like XMMS, which looks like WinAmp. Downloaded
AVI files won’t play properly on the default Movie Player, but
installing VLC Media Player (using Synaptic) will take care of that."

This is a VERY common (universal?) complaint.  Does the default movie
player work for anyone?

Also, XMMS has not been maintained for some time.  It forked into
several projects that are still alive, like Beep Media Player 2 and
Audacious.  Is a replacement planned for Edgy?

"Burning a VCD from AVI files is even trickier. In very broad strokes,
you’ll need to install K3b, a CD burning program, and a package called
VCDimager, and tell K3b where it’s located. You’ll also need a
command-line program called FFmpeg to convert AVI files to MPG, which is
the format that K3b uses. Sounds complicated? It is, but it’s doable."

Is this really easy on Windows?  Last time I tried anything like this it
was a PITA.

Lee