I updated my guide to compiling MPlayer on Fedora. Of course, this guide is no longer necessary to most people, since RPM’s are available, however seeing as the software is a bit complex I compile it to suit my own needs. I’ve received many emails from NON Fedora users who have found the guide useful. So I will maintain it. Some things have changed in the past 7 months. LIVE.COM, which provided streaming library support for MPlayer, was renamed to LIVE555.

The most current version of Flash for Linux is version 7.0 while Windows users are already on 8.0. However Macromedia has officially stated that there will be an upcoming version 8.5 for Linux. However it will be shipped after the Windows version becomes available. Even though that post states that no 64bit version is being planned, another engineer has stated that there is some work being done towards a 64bit version.

For Linux and Open Source in general, choice has always been abundant. However in both the Linux Server market and to a degree in the Linux “Desktop” market only a few major distributions have taken most attention. In my (future) spare time, I plan on evaluating new Linux distributions to see how well they compare for either a Linux Server (preliminary examination) and more critically: the Linux Desktop. I want to develop a common test/evaluation plan for different distributions so I make fair assessments on their comparable value.

The purpose of this article is to explain the potential problems in installing every package that comes included in any given Linux distribution. For the most part, this is a bad practice and is not conducive to becoming proficient in Linux for either a seasoned professional or a newcomer (ie. “newbie”). It is my hope that this will help educate people on this subject matter. There are some abundancy arguments that are commonly used and overstated.

I’ve been following along with the improvements made by the MPlayer development team through their mailing list. When Fedora Core 4 came out there were some (I think many) issues with the choice to use GCC4 (the GNU Compiler). Many applications, such as MPlayer, were not yet supported. There were patches from other groups, but the MPlayer team did not officially support it. As usual I compiled from source, but I used GCC3.