Re: [SLUG] Keeping wife on linux

[Glen Turner <gdt@xxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Barnett wrote:
> My wife and I have a shared computer at home, however, I seem to be 
> facing a loosing battle for her experiences with linux to remain 
> pleasant. I am running fedora core 9 with additional packages from the 
> Livna repository

Ah, an experience I know well.

> * We've not been able to find a way to purchase songs from Yahoo or 
> iTunes. I've tried foxy tunes and wine without much success.

iTunes isn't going to work. Every time a good free iTunes client
gets a following Apple go and alter the iTunes backend to defeat
it.

I got it working under Wine, but it was a painful experience I
wouldn't recommend.

> * We've had some difficulty with video codecs. Channel nine or ten is 
> using a codec which includes advertisements but only works for Windows 
> Media Player 10+.

Is that still true, both the sites seems to have moved to flash?

What you need is the Windows codecs download from mplayer.org. This
is blatant copyright infringement (a copy of the Windows DLLs), which
is why they aren't in Livna.

> I've been toying with using vmware and running XP SP2, but I think that 
> it would leave me with two systems to maintain rather than one. I may 
> also have to buy a new machine (dual core) to meet the system requirements.

If you want to play videos flowingly and access the USB port for the iPod
you'd better happier with dual boot.

VMWare and Fedora are not a happy mix. You might want two try KVM if you
have a CPU with virtualisation features.  Which can be checked by looking
for output from
   egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
Otherwise Qemu is nice but slow.

--
 Glen Turner