SuSE 9.1 Personal not good for multimedia?

[Chris Aitken]

I am a day away from installing SuSE Personal 9.1 (epressly for 
multitrack sound recording) and then I came across this warning at 
http://www.madpenguin.org/Article1226.html. This review advises that 
SuSE 9.1 Personal is good for everyone but me:

I am a bit concerned with the multimedia capabilities of this distro 
compared to other multimedia-rich distros like Mandrake Linux. Although 
I admit I'm completely ignorant of the laws governing or prohibiting the 
distribution of a working DVD player in Linux, I do think that there 
/has/ to be a way to make this work. There /is/ software available that 
can play DVD media on Linux, Windows, Mac, etc.. so why isn't there a 
legal way to make this work? Is it regions? If so, isn't there a way to 
make the end user select their region the first time the Xine engine is 
called upon to play a DVD? I'm not a programmer, but it seems this would 
be possible. If this distro was loaded with multimedia capabilities, I 
think it would round it out very well, to the extent that it would be 
worth more than the $29.95 price tag in my opinion.

The bottom line is this: If you are new to Linux and are interested in 
learning just enough to get your feet wet, and don't plan on getting 
under the hood for quite some time, this distribution might be for you. 
The only concern you should have is multimedia support, which SUSE 
<http://www.suse.com> will hopefully address as soon as possible. Other 
than that, this is a very capable desktop that you should find worthy of 
the price tag... and to be absolutely honest with you, a great 
introduction to Linux. There aren't that many distributions I would 
recommend to extremely green Linux users, but SUSE <http://www.suse.com> 
is one of them.

Chris

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