Well, I am now hosting off my brand new server at work. Yes – it is a server, not a desktop I am working on. Here are the specs:
Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz processors
1.5 GB PC2700 RAM
72 GB SCSI RAID hard disks
Quatro FX 500 video card
and to top it off, a nice 19″ LCD monitor.
Also, I have decided to go with Ubuntu as my Linux distribution of choice. I have been impressed by it’s ease of use in all areas except multimedia support. The problem is a philosophical one – An operating system that has 100% free open-source software cannot include codecs. However, an operating system without codecs is useless (to me). What good is a music player if it can only play CD’s?
Also I would like to mention that the Regular Guys have come back to the land of FM. I can once again enjoy Larry in my left ear, and Eric in my right. They haven’t missed a beat, and are just as funny as ever. You can listen to the radio show online here:
Zone of Mr. Frosti 
All the cool servers don’t have monitors.
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2 things. It is a workstation, not a server. Yes, there is a differance. Secondly, Ubuntu has a ton of codecs. It actually has my favorite audio codec, ogg. It does not have closed source, esp ones with major liscensing issues (mp3s), codecs by default. It is availible though. The same with normal Debian. You have to actually get the codecs yourself.
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Mp3, no matter what problems it is currently facing, IS the standard right now. Not including it means the OS is not functional out of the box. This is something out of Ubuntu’s control however, so I don’t blame them for it. And my desktop is a server – I just keep telling myself that. After all, you are reading this page…
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MP3 is a standard, but not the standard. It is just a file format. One that is widely used, but that is like saying that Divx is the standard for video. It isn’t. Because you cannot play mp3s though, you are saying the OS is not fuctional out of the box? Are you serious? The only way you can even come close to making that argument is if one of two things occured. You loaded Ubuntu as you MP3 player, or if in order to run it needs to play mp3s that tell the machine how to boot and your machine understands audio as input. Neither of these I would think are the case though. You can apt-get mp3 support though. It is not like you have to downlaod and configure compile install mp3 support.
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“It is not like you have to downlaod and configure compile install mp3 support.” Ala SuSE 9.3.
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