5. Software Installation

5.1. Macromedia Flash

Fedora won't distribute from their site because Macromedia's license doesn't permit it, but there are no other legal barriers to using the RPMs at http://macromedia.mplug.org/.

With the up2date preparation described above, you can install Flash by typing:

up2date flash-plugin

5.2. MP3

Fedora won't ship MP3-capable software because the Fraunhofer Institute's patent license terms are not compatible with the GPL.

Note: If your Fedora distribution is fresh out of the box, you will probably have to make /dev/dsp be owned by yourself before you can play any sounds at all.

Assuming you've got your yum configuration pointed at livna.org the command

up2date xmms-mp3

should make your XMMS program mp3-capable.

Installing xmms-mp3 will probably install an ALSA library, which you can ignore if using a pre-2.6, non-ALSA configuration. To actually enable MP3 playing, you'll need to run xmms. Select Options > Preferences > Audio I/O Plugins from the menu; this will pop up a window listing plugins. Select "MPEG Layer 1/2/3 Placeholder Plugin" and uncheck [ ] Enable Plugin. With this placeholder gone, xmms will plug in xmms-mp3 automatically.

If you want simple MP3 sound editing, I'm a big fan of Audacity (but be aare that some newer Audacity releases, after about 9.1, have known problems with ALSA and with the AC97-compatible sound chips now built into many motherboards). The command

up2date audacity

will grab and install both Audacity (a very nifty multi-format audio editor) and the lame library that it needs as a plugin to do MP3s. Audacity has no IP-law problems in itself; lame is affected by the Fraunhofer Institute patents.

5.3. Java

Java is downloadable and redistributable from Sun, but only for personal and not-for-profit use. Sun's Javs license is non-open-source, so Fedora and most other Linux distributions won't carry it.

Assuming your yum configuration points at Dag Wieers's repository, the following command will Java-enable your browser:

yum install mozilla-j2re

You can test your Java plugin at Sun's Applets page. Note that some of these applets (Escher and Starfield, when I checked) appear to be broken. BouncingHeads makes a good test.

5.4. Adobe Acrobat

You may have noticed that PDF pages downloaded off the Web often display as blank pages in Mozilla, though they look fine when viewed locally with xpdf. I don't know why this is, but in several cases I've been told by the creator that they were made with Adobe Acrobat. It is therefore a good bet that Adobe's official Acrobat plugin will help. Install it with

yum install mozilla-acroread

Adobe's Acrobat plugin is proprietary, so Fedora and other distributions won't carry it. But there is no known legal problem with the RPM.

5.5. Local MPEG and AVI

MPEG (the format used on DVDs) represents itself as an open standard, but most Linux distributions won't ship software that read it because of blocking patents held by MPEGLA. AVI and Apple QuickTime have proprietary codecs covered by patents, so most Linux distributions won't ship software that decodes them, either. But with the setup we've described, this command

up2date xine

will install or update the xine player that can handle these formats. Doing this will also install a number of support libraries, including the libdvdcss plugin that the xine people won't talk about on their site because they are too frightened of the DVDCCA's attack lawyers.

Test this on any DVD. Remember that you have to either link /dev/dvd with your physical DVD device or go through xine's impenetrable configuration dialogue. Also remember that the physical device has to be readable by you.

xine has an elaborate GUI of its own, but most of the guts of the program are in a callable library and there are several other front ends for it floating around (none of them shipped with FC1). One of these is gxine, a Gnome front end which as of January 2004 doesn't have an active maintainer. Another (which I haven't seen but have been told good things about) is the kaffeine front end for KDE. Both of these are carried at livna.org. But the best of the front ends is probably totem, available from livna.org. This is a nice clean interface that doesn't confuse the eye by trying to look like expensive stereo equipment.

5.6. Streaming Web audio and video

Here are some test locations to try streaming audio and video clips from:

• AVI

• QuickTime

• Windows Media

• MPEG

• RealPlayer

The Netscape folks have a Plug-in Manager web page that's handy for checking which plugins you have available and which MIME types they interpret (the "Show Details" link below each plugin takes you to the associated MIME type list).

The rest of this section describes several almost complete failures, mainly so that you will know that they are not due to a misconfiguration on your part. Linux multimedia streaming is still very, very broken.

up2date mplayerplug-in

up2date gxine