My first impressions were wow! the live cd was in itself cool. Now the installed version is really superb. It is more responsive than the previous Mandriva 2009 Spring.
Screen Resolution: After installing the drivers for Nvidia card, i was able to go up from 1152x768 to 1280x1024 resolution. Now the screen look like it has more space.
MP3 Playback: Next thing. I went into check if it could play MP3. I know that it wouldn't but just to make it sure, and it wasn't playing. Totem told i need to install some gstream plugins, and mentioned 3 plugins. I installed them still it was not playing them, So i went up to the ubuntu software center -> Sound & Video and installed Gstreamer fluendo mpeg2 demux plugin and Gstreamer plugins for aac, xvid, mpeg2, faad. Now Totem is playing MP3. But Mandriva was playing these by default.
Watching Movie: Once again i opened a Divx movie with Totem. It played the movie, it was smooth. The same movie would not play smoothly, you would have to enable drop frames mode to watch it with a very slightly noticable drag in Mandriva 2009 spring. I can't say that it is playing the movie by default, may be because of the plugins which i installed to make mp3 work, is helping it here or...
DVD Playback: This is something where i was a little disappointed. First I tried with a region encoded dvd. Which did not play with Totem, then an encrypted DVD, which also didn't play. I was a little doubtful weather totem will be able to play them, so i installed Mplayer and VLC, even these two didn't play them, then i proceeded with a normal dvd without any encryption or Region Coding. it played well, though the system was stammering a little at the begining of the movie , it improved as the movie went by. Mandriva atleast played the region encoded movies by default. I think i will have to install libdvdcss.
So i went into Ubuntu Software Center again and searched for it, and it was not there. i searched for plf repositories for ubuntu and i found that i have to use it from medibuntu. I tried adding that repository via UI, which was confusing. So i had to go into the terminal for the first time. i copied and pasted the command from the medibuntu site and it was added.
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get -q update
Then again i was searching for libdvdcss via UI, it was elusive to me. So again i go to terminal and type the command to get it.
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2
Now Totem plays both encrypted dvd and region coded dvd. and i have to say this, again. This is better than Mandriva it did not skip here in ubuntu. But totem did crash when going to full screen playing a region coded dvd. Atleast VLC and MPlayer are not crashing playing these dvds.
Browsing: See i am writing things from firefox here. So it seems to be working. I am not that much into Youtube and such, so i not worrying about flash, but i can see that it is not installed by default, and i saw it in repositories. So if i ever require, it will install it.
So i think i have everything that i will ever need here, in this desktop, MP3, DVDs playback for me, openoffice for my dad to work, browsing for everyone. That pretty much does it. and that too, much more improved performance that mandriva.
I have to say this. I am not doing a comparison between Mandriva 2009 Spring and Ubuntu Karmic Koala. I am just saying the differences that i am noticing between these two versions. May be the difference is due to Gnome in Ubuntu and KDE in Mandriva, or may be 2009 Spring was a updated version and Ubuntu was a clean install one or In ubuntu i have installed Nvidia driver and in Mandriva i did not. Whatever it is, I don't care.
Everything me and my family need this desktop to do, is working. May be i had to go thru something for sound and video, rest worked out of the box. So, why is it i am hearing that i have to switch back to windows from some of my friends. I don't know. It is still not the Year of the Linux, but yes we are moving there.
The Machine:
Processor : AMD Sempron 1500+
Motherboard : Giagabyte K8 Triton Series
Memory : 256 MB
Graphics : Nvidia GeForce fx 5200 128MB
No comments:
Post a Comment