[Sussex] An interesting article (well I thought so!)

[Desmond Armstrong]

> Did you buy your Mandriva box pre-installed?  Remember this guy did and
> do you think that Dell is going to ship code that is covered by US 
> patents?
> If you installed Mandriva yourself was there a part of that install where
> you clicked a box that said "Download 3rd party software to play MP3s and
> DVDs?  WARNING: Doing so my be illegal in your country."
>   
I have never seen any message about legality or otherwise.
The multi-region part of VLC, libdvdcss2 comes from the 'penquin 
liberation front'. but the resy of vlc is downloaded from Mandriva. 
Because I subscribe to Mandriva I can download closed source software 
from them.

The installation is done by me and so far, I have only bought one 
machine which was preloaded with Linux and that was with 'Thiz Linux', 
not to my liking so was quickly replaced with Mandrake at that time.

Unfortunately what does come across is that Dell should have installed 
Ubuntu AND polished up some aspects before releasing to the market, 
there is no reason why they should not have included some codecs and 
some closed source software with their product. The long term ideal is 
that all software should be open source but we must live with some 
manufacturers software as long as it interfaces correctly.

The computers we are using as a group have the base system installed and 
we have all done quite a lot of work to optimize our systems and I do 
appreciate and freely admit that my work in setting up peoples home 
computers is the result of some considerable experience and a lot of 
sweat. However I am giving ordinary users a good experience of reliable 
well installed computers. Clearly there is much work to do before Dell 
and Lenova computers are working properly at point of sale. And I cannot 
see why such major manufacturers are apparently not taking their role 
seriously enough.