[Lancaster] Re: Help -- Video importing/processing software

[Richard Robinson]

On Fri, Aug 04, 2006 at 08:53:25AM +0100, Ken Hough wrote:
> Ken Walton wrote:
> 
> >I've been reading this exchange with interest, and wondered what your 
> >views are on Freespire...
> >
> >http://www.freespire.org/
> 
> It sounds good on paper, but I haven't tried it so am unable to make any 
> meaningful comments about freespire.
> 
> There are a lot of Linux distros about (hundreds!) which claim to be the 
> answer to various problems. Many fall by the wayside through lack of 
> user and/or developer support.

Yeah, it's irritating. But maybe now and then they throw up some good ideas,
which bubble to the surface and get picked up ? .deb packaging, for example,
is IMO a great improvement on the .tgz that was state of the art 10 years
ago. And Knoppix kicked off the "Live CD" idea, which is a great improvement
on the Rescue Floppy ...


The "selling point" of this freespire appears to be the ability to (easily)
include unexaminable binaries ? I suppose that's nice if you need it, not
sure I'd want to trust it too far meself. The FUD in the FA puts me off
somewhat - "A big portion of the world is turned off by Linux, because
it doesn't legally support things like MP3 <and other formats> out of
the box". "apt-get install mpg321" worked fine for me. So offputting, eh ?
They may have more of a case with the other formats they mention (which
I don't really need too much, so I don't know), but they definitely
overstate it here. Which, as I say, puts me off.



-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem