A newbie's observations

[Grant Cullen]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:

>On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 03:24:58PM -0500, Patrick wrote:
>  
>
>>My interest has been in using Linux rather than making it work. As a 70-plus 
>>member of the great unwashed public, so to speak, my comments might be of 
>>interest. 
>>I installed SuSe 9.2 about six months ago. I would never have made it where I 
>>am now without the valiant efforts of my middle son. From that point of view 
>>SuSe is not for the faint of heart. Maybe Red Hat is easier.
>>That said, my expectations have been fulfilled 100%. I have a stable system 
>>that I can rely on. 
>>KDE, supplemented by a program called Kall, enables me to E-mail directly from 
>>my "Kontact" list of contacts and to have the computer dial their number when 
>>I want to phone them. That's a big help as one gets older and begins the 
>>embarrassing habit of getting digits in the wrong order.
>>I have just connected my new digital camera to the system and can use Gimp to 
>>manipulate the results. 
>>I enjoy Open Office programs and find browsing and picking up my E-mails fast 
>>and safe.
>>However, one or two concerns remain. Can anybody shed any light on them?
>>1. I have yet to find a radio station that will play music over my speakers 
>>other than WBJC in Baltimore. Are there such animals around, or is every 
>>station a captive to you know who?
>>2. I like to listen to investment webcasts. But, once again, the companies 
>>concerned seem happy to limit themselves to Windows Media or the Windows 
>>version of Real Player. Even my broker, who has quite a good web site, has 
>>taken to telling me I must download the Acrobat Reader (Windows version is 
>>implied) to read my statements when I have a perfectly good Linux Acrobat 
>>reader that opens PDF files on other pages of the same broker's site for me 
>>daily.
>>    
>>
>
>On my system (running Debian 3.1 with addons from the Marillat
>multimedia package archive) I can listen to realaudio and mediaplayer
>broadcasts, although I often have to view the source of the web page to
>find what the broken javascript they used was supposed to launch, go
>to the correct page, view the source of that page, find the link to a
>.mss or .asp or .ram or whatever media player file format they used,
>download that and then launch that file with mplayer at which point it
>works great.  It is an awful lot of work to go through for something
>that should have been very simple if the page didn't have IE only
>javascript and the link to the stream embedded in a silly file format.
>
>I know some of it could be solved if the fiel associations for those
>special files were added to make it launch mplayer on them
>automatically, but hte broken javascript can only be fixed by either
>adding more support for IE extensions to browsers on linux, or people
>writing proper code on their webpages in the first place.
>
>So it is technically possible to listen to those streams on Linux, it
>just tends to be a real pain to get at the stream from Linux.
>
>  
>
>>Is there any way of persuading the great world out there that there are other 
>>computer users than Windows or Mac users, and that we have a right to be 
>>served in our own language? This is a real stumbling block we yet have to 
>>overcome.
>>    
>>
>
>That part may be hard given many website maintainers have no idea what
>they are doing and are just clicking buttons in MS FrontPage or
>Dreamweaver.  So even if the page could easily be made to work for all
>users, it is simpler (for them) to just make it work with IE or Windows
>in general.
>
>Lennart Sorensen
>--
>The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
>TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
>How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml
>  
>
Well said Lennart, the other part of the problem is that both Microsoft 
and Apple have large advertising and promotion budgets that most people 
only see the big players even though there are better alternatives.

Patrick as to radio stations without hassles.  I regularly listen to a 
couple of old time radio broadcasts, both play nicely on real player 
Linux.  http://www.yesterdayusa.com (7x24)  http://www.radiospirits.com 
  (a couple of programs a day)

Grant Cullen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml