RH10 multimedia support

Joseph Phillips jphillips at amphus.com
Fri Sep 5 22:34:57 UTC 2003


No, I'm not saying that Red Hat should distribute the plugins.

I'm just saying that they should be plugin friendly.  I'm asking for Red
Hat to engineer an easy way for the user to install the plugins.

Not to be flippant, but when I think of the word "plugin", an image
comes to mind of a simple process of easily inserting an object into a
larger object.  But with the way it works in RH9, it's more like
"hackin".  Regular users shouldn't have to drop to a console, perform
esoteric soft links commands to a lib directory that is buried somewhere
deep in the system directory structure.

I'm not an engineer, so I don't have any specific engineering
suggestions to solve the problem.  But, anyhow, one of my ideas is to
have maybe a "plugin manager" that automatically performs the process of
downloading and installing the plugins, all based on a GUI wizard.  Or,
have the wizard built-in to the browser, so when the user goes to a site
with java/flash, a pop-up dialog (ala IE) appears and walks the user
through downloading and installing.  If you take all of the, say, top 5
supported plugins, well I'm sure there are standard download locations
for each of them (plus a few mirrors as well).  So the wizard could
query each of the download mirrors to see which one is available (or
which one is the fastest).  I don't know though, maybe that's illegal to
do, or maybe it requires some legal process that Red Hat doesn't want to
involve itself in.


On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 15:20, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Friday 05 September 2003 15:03, Joseph Phillips wrote:
> > It's the same issue with Java and flash player for the browser. I'm
> > not shy of the console, but still I'd prefer an easier way to get
> > plugins installed. Like the way IE does it for example: if you go to
> > a site that has java or flash, a little pop-up comes up and prompts
> > you to automatically install the software. I don't see why Red Hat
> > can't accomplish this with the browsers they bundle in their
> > distribution (epiphany, galeon, konqueror, mozilla).
> 
> Because of the EULA you must agree to prior to installing said plugins.  
> It's not legal for Red Hat to distribute said plugins.





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