Ranter or evangelist?

Antonio Olivares olivares14031 at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 17 01:34:16 UTC 2009




--- On Thu, 7/16/09, gilpel at altern.org <gilpel at altern.org> wrote:

> From: gilpel at altern.org <gilpel at altern.org>
> Subject: Ranter or evangelist?
> To: fedora-list at redhat.com
> Date: Thursday, July 16, 2009, 7:26 PM
> Why is it that, when I insert an
> audio disk, I see it as an audio disk on
> my desktop, but when I click it, GNOME shows the .wav files
> that are
> present. No application is suggested, even under "Open", to
> play the
> damned music. If I go to Application, sound and video, the
> first option,
> "Audio Player", opens XMMS.
> 
> Great! I click the forward button... I'm presented with a
> list of the...
> no, no, no! not the files on the CD, but the files in my
> home directory!!!
> Wow, we're really moving forward! I painfully navigate to
> /media, there's
> nothing in /media.
> 
> Let's check mtab, my DVD/CD is on sr0, I believe. Nope,
> nothing there.
> 
> Well, if the intend was to scare away Mac and Windows
> users, I would think
> that the success rate is 100%. I've been using Linux for 8
> years and even
> "I" am scared! I do understand Fedora is for geeks, but
> would it make
> their life that difficult if things kinda worked? Didn't
> anybody notice
> that the present set-up makes absolutely no sense?
> 
> At least, normally, you should go to => System,
> Preference, File
> Management, Media to select a default CD and DVD player.
> Still impossible!
> No option to change anything. I wrote about this. Nobody
> replied.
> 
> Who's responsible for setting things this way? Is anyboby
> responsible
> somewhere or is it "We do all this together in a haphazard
> way" ? If so,
> never expect any significant market share for Linux.
> Radio-Canada will
> continue to use Windows Media because "Linux is too hard
> for ordinary
> people" (MSFT trademark).
> 
> You think I'm a ranter? I've been told this quite often.
> But, while some
> people write code, I write to the Quebec Press Council.
> 
> I explain that a certain so-called journalist is just a
> Microsoft
> sycophant. Every time he used Windows Vista, of course,
> there were a
> few... almost bugs. but certainly no show stopper.
> 
> With Linux, the question is more complex. When a new
> version of Firefox
> comes out, for instance, instead of waiting for the
> upgrade, he gets the
> executable at Mozilla and, then, everything gets really
> complicated.
> 
> Of course, the Press Concil understands perfectly what's
> going on. I made
> sure my basic complaint was very easy to understand: I
> explained the
> journalist NEVER discussed the appropriateness for the
> State --
> television, amongst others -- of using proprietary format
> and never
> discussed tied sales. That's it, that's all.
> 
> Still, after counceiding that the Press organisation
> lawyers had well
> understood my POV, the Council judged that the journalist
> gives a lot of
> coverage to Linux --  they didn't elabore on the kind
> of coverage: they
> can't evaluate, of course -- and, you know, given that
> Linux hardly has 1%
> of the market share, they found the coverage was adequate.
> 
> So, I filed an appeal... and sent a copy to the
> Professional Federation of
> Journalists... I got my appeal.
> 
> But the fight is far from over. The Press Council is
> heavily subsidized by
> the employer of said journalist, and Radio-Canada, another
> member of the
> Microsoft club. Seeing subsidies vaporize scares the shit
> out of those
> learned men: they could lose their precious jobs!
> 
> So, they'll try every trick in the book to give a very mild
> tone to their
> judgement. But I have a few other tricks in my book to set
> the records
> straight, though having the support from the Linux
> community would
> certainly help.
> 
> Cause... do you really believe I got any help from local
> coders for this
> fight? I got none, absolutely NONE. Why? Cause I'm a
> ranter. In other
> words, though I am not a programmer, when I see things that
> are not done
> correctly, I say so. They tell me I should fix the bugs.
> 
> Why is it that there are so many programmers and I can't
> even set a
> default application for reading CD and DVDs? While I'm
> alone to do what I
> consider my job, why is it that the whole community doesn't
> get its act
> together to do such simple things?
> 
> Sometimes I wished I could proselytize in a more positive
> way. I'd like to
> tell Apple users that Linux equals or surpasses OS X in
> user friendlyness,
> but it doesn't. It was like this ten years ago, it is still
> like this now.
> Countrary to what we could think from the success of Steve
> Jobs at the
> helm of Apple, in the Linux world, the only people who
> count are
> programmers. They'll fix things... soon.
> 
> But Linux is not so young anymore. After 18 years, it has
> 1% market share.
> I believe there are some organizational bugs that need to
> be ironed out.
> For now, from an administrative POV, Linux is a
> merry-go-round that
> doesn't make much sense.
> 
> What do you say, am I a ranter or an evangelist? Is it good
> for Linux to
> be ruled by programmers, the alternative not being
> necessarily the
> marketing department? :)
> 
> Red Hat has some clout. How come they don't say "We want a
> music player
> that first detects CD files and plays them" and accept to
> include them on
> the default CD only on this condition?
> 
> Etc., etc., etc.
> 
> -- 


Rythmbox, Totem, Audio CD Extractor are just a few apps in Gnome that can play cd's.  Do you have any of those installed?

There is also amarok, kscd, Kaffeine,  ..., others on KDE desktop. You mentioned xmms, it should also play cd's.  Maybe the device is not setup correctly?  It should be pointing to /dev/sr0

And when all of the above fail and all you want is to hear your cd, turn to command line and use icedax(the replacement for cdda2wav)

Use
$ cdda2wav -eN dev=/dev/sr0 -tX where X is the track you want to hear, for hearing the whole cd use -B 

I hear you, but I am just a user like you and I turn to command line mostly and rip the cd's to ogg/mp3 sometimes both because I have a car stereo that does not play oggs :(

With regards to Ranter or Evangelist?  I say none of the above.   It is like sound, when it works it just works, but when it does not the default is to blame p_________ :)  but even though dmesg can tell you some other things :) but that is beyond a mortal's understanding :) 



Hope this helps,

Antonio


      




More information about the fedora-list mailing list