Open Sourcery

The Freedom Toaster allows people to stop by and pickup a linux distribution of their choice at the click of a button!

Absolutely amazing, what will we see next…?

Just sharing a quick thought really. I must admit that I thought it would be a real effort to get AVI files to play in Linux, especially DivX. DVD’s sounded even more unrealistic. To my surprise I discovered two applications that made this job really easy.

Mplayer is a powerful open source media player. Capable of playing a lot of different formats out the box. I installed it using yum from Dag’s repository and it was a snap really. It didn’t take to playing my DivX files, but that was some wierd display error on my test box (still uses a 3Dfx Banshee card).

I then recalled something called XINE and a quick Google revealed that it’s another media player. Took a chance and I saw that Dag had these as well, let yum do the dirty work and of we go.

Two players that can both play DVD’s and a lot of other formats was well. They work well and the quality is great considering my test box is only a 667Mhz box with 256MB memory and a rusty old 3dfx card.

For people looing at plating other formats like RealMedia, get a copy of HelixPlayer from RealMedia. It looks nice, could find a file to test it with though. It comes standard with Fedora Core 3, so just open the package manager and let rip.

Wrong!

I’ve heard so many people complain about Fedora Core not being able to play MP3’s, or show Flash animations, and even JAVA not working correctly. Is it so difficult to just Google for some solutions?

On the topic of MP3’s, Flash, JAVA and other missing software, why not visit the The Unofficial Fedora FAQ. The author of this website went to great lengths to help people with the same queries. It’s all unofficial, but it works. It’s helped many FC noobs to get their distro up to speed. And for those still using Core 2 and Core 1, the old FAQ’s are still available on the site, though I doubt their maintained anymore.

If you’re like me and use yum for evey attempt at installing new software, you should most definitely visit Dag Wieers’ website. All the packages you can imagine for Fedora Core and Red Hat Linux. It’s in the true spirit of OSS that Dag releases these packages, asking for attribution and something from his wishlist. This is nothing if you look at the effort going into maintaining the site and over 1400 packages.

Hopefully you now too realise that Fedora Core is as powerfull as any other linux, and has an equal abundance of software available to it’s users as any other linux.

To find out why Red Hat did not put MP3 support in any of the Fedora Core releases, visit mp3licensing.com. It’s all about licensing the software, and they want to keep Fedora Core free. Why do other distros support MP3 playback then? Ask your lawyer.

CIRT.net is website providing some interesting tools to help webmasters secure their servers and their websites. Best of all it’s GPL!

Have a look at Nikto. From the website:

Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 3100 potentially dangerous files/CGIs, versions on over 625 servers, and version specific problems on over 230 servers. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated (if desired).

In todays world no server is safe, and with exploits now being discovered in more and more websites it doesn’t improve the admin’s odds.