There was some discussion on the fedora-devel list about changing the default architecture for 32-bit Fedora. Which would mean that users running 32-bit Fedora with modern CPU’s will see some improvement, while older hardware will need to be supported by some secondary means or not at all. There are some good points in the thread, but the question I found myself asking was: “Why do I still run 32-bit Linux at all?

If you are using Xine from RPMFusion and experiencing crashing immediately after loading in Fedora 10, it is probably due to this bug. Quick work-around is to use Alsa instead of PulseAudio. Open a shell and launch Xine as follows: [mirandam@phoebe ~]$ xine -A alsa To make this setting stick, do the following: Right-Click in the Xine window > Settings > Setup…. In the gui tab, change the Configuration experience level to Advanced, then hit Apply at the bottom of the window.

I have a 4yr old Athlon-XP machine which I use as a Media Center/Home Theater PC. It is running RedHat 8.0 (heavily modified) with a Hauppauge PVR-250, MPlayer and some simple/buggy front end. Seeing as I designed it at the end of 2003, quite a bit of software is out of date. The most critical componets are the ivtv driver that runs the PVR-250 and MPlayer. I won’t update the ivtv because I built it for a 2.

The MPlayer team released RC2 of the multimedia package. The last release RC1 was almost 12 months ago. The changes are typical: newer support of less significant codecs, major optimizations and improvements on more popular codecs. This release has a great deal of work done on streaming (Live555). I don’t know if we will ever see an official 1.0 release, however it seems unimportant as everyone probably should just be updating their “snapshots” of MPlayer ever 3-4 months so they don’t have to wait 14 or 12 months.

The jokes made about confusing Linux dependancies may at times seem funny, but they reflect a sad truth. After my previous complaint about gui nuisances in Rythmbox, I installed of copy of FC6 - 64bit to a spare partition. Following my own FC6 Guide, I came upon the MP3 section. Adding MP3 support to Rythmbox (GTK based GNOME media player) requires: yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly This downloads 7 packages which are less than 1MB and most come from the Livna repository.