FC3 vs. Windows 2000

[Temlakos]

STYMA, ROBERT E (ROBERT) wrote:
> Dear Fedora Advocates,
>    My brother in law will be returning from Iraq
> in another couple of months and one of the things
> I am doing for him is to build him a computer.  He
> is not technically adept and his computer activity
> is pretty much limited to looking at his email 
> on yahoo and a little web surfing.  Sometimes he
> prints an email or two.
> 
> I am vacillating on building an FC3 machine or a W2k
> machine.

First, Windows 2000 is obsolete even by Microsoft standards. They will 
sell you a Windows XP license, which costs much more. Worse yet, Windows 
XP is very resource-hungry in comparison to any distribution of Linux, 
or even in comparison to Windows 2000.

Second, having plug-ins for every kind of multimedia file one might 
encounter is highly over-rated. True enough, the Musical Instrument 
Digital Interface (MIDI) still has not been ported to Linux. Equally 
true, much of the sound content on the Web is in the form of MP3 files, 
and MP3 is not an open-source protocol. (Actually, however, RealPlayer 
10 for Linux will play MP3's without a hitch, since RealPlayer paid the 
freight for an MP3 license.) But your friend has to ask himself whether 
"a little Web surfing" will necessarily include every kind of sound file 
that's published.

Third, you can get plug-ins for Mozilla and Firefox very easily--at 
Mozilla's own site, or from the FreshRPMS, Dag, Dries, and AT 
repositories. (You can also point to the Livna repository, but its apps 
aren't built from the same source code as those on the others, so Livna 
doesn't mix well with the others.)

All of which is to say that you're better off going with Fedora Core and 
/especially/ FC3.

Now I wouldn't so much say /no/ need for anti-virus software. Instead I 
would suggest that you install ClamAV, the open-source anti-virus 
solution for GNU/Linux and similar platforms. I use it myself. Of 
course, Linux is a lot easier to secure from viruses than MS Windows 
ever will be. You can get ClamAV from any of the popular repositories.

You can obtain the Java Runtime Environment directly from Sun 
Microsystems, or from a Fedora-compatible repo. The first alternative 
would let you get the latest version.

As for codecs to play most Windows-compatible multimedia files: Install 
mplayer, or the Linux Movie Player, and then follow this link:

http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/falsehope/home/rathann/apt/7.3/RPMS.stable/mplayer-codecs-win32-2.0-1.i386.html

It has a link to download an RPM that will install all the codecs you 
need. Then again, there's another link somewhere out there that has a 
tar-ball for installing those codecs--more on tar-balls below.

The best thing to do, then, is:

1.	Install FC3.
2.	Configure Firefox for Web pages and Thunderbird for e-mail.
3.	Search Google on the following key words: dag, dries, freshrpms, 
at-stable, livna, gstreamer, and fedora.us. Most of these repos will 
give you specific lines to configure the file yum.conf and the file 
sources in etc/sysconfig/rhn, so that you can use up2date and/or yum to 
keep your applications up to date, and use yum to find new packages. (Go 
to http://fedoranews.org/tchung/gyum/fc3/ and learn how to get a 
Graphical User Interface front-end for yum, written especially for Fedora.)

All of these repos offer apt, the package-transfer system developed 
originally for Debian and then rewritten for RPM packages for the 
Conectiva distribution and now available for all RPM-based distros.

Apt works with a GUI-based front-end called Synaptic that lets you see 
at a glance which packages are available in the repositories you set 
up--but yum will let you set the machine up to fetch and install updates 
/automatically/ either every morning when you start up, or every night 
if you leave the machine on 24x7.

And to answer your basic question: Yes, you /can/ obtain plug-ins and 
other applications in a small number of places. The days where you had 
to chase all over the Net to find all the apps you need are long gone.

So you install an additional package-management system, either yum or 
apt, and configure a few repositories for yum or apt to search for new 
packages and updates.

Then you can fetch just about anything you need, either from the 
repositories or directly from some of the developers.

In the extreme cases, you can fetch the tar-balls and build your extra 
applications right on the system. Advantage: as long as you have the gcc 
compiler family and the linker (gmake), you can build anything, and when 
you do, you get a custom build for your hardware. Disadvantage: 
time-consuming and a slightly steeper learning curve.

Good luck!

Temlakos