Quite recently I bought an AMD64 based PC, fully loaded up with WinXP Pro SP2 Media Edition, and all the goodies- the best high end machine I could find in my area at a decent price. I was, and still am amazed at how snappin' quick and stable this rig is, even though it's running 32 bit Windows in a 64 bit environment. So, I thought that if I could get my hands on a 64 bit OS, it would really make it sing. WRONG!!!

I managed to download the 5 CD set of Fedora Core-4 64 Bit ( which was quite a feat in itself), then had to download a special patch recommended by Microsoft so as to "explode" these ISO-wrapped CD's. Now I was in business.

First try- installed Fedora with the PC "in situ", that is, downstairs where my entertainment gear is, not upstairs with my DSL Modem and Belkin Router. The new PC connects via a USB connected LinkSys Wireless-G adapter which the PC dealer threw in for free to sweeten the deal. So the first thing I had to do was to get Linux to connect over that adapter. Well, it turns out that there ain't no driver for it, nowhere, no-how. So, I brought everything upstairs so I could wire-connect it to the router- no problem with this of course, as Linux recognized the on-board VIA ethernet driver.

So, I ended up with a clean install, and then ran a complete "yum" upgrade. This worked flawlessly, although by now I was starting to notice that Fedora Core 4-64 is noticably slower than Windows XP. With Win, the bootup time is about half that of Linux, and the desktop just snaps into place. The Linux KDE just kind of opens up with several "jerks". Kind of disappointing.

So now I wanted to try using a few things. First- net-surfing with Mozilla. not bad, but noticably slower and jerkier than Mozilla on Windows. Next- see how well Fedora handles music. There are a few music player packages included with the distro, and the default seemingly is a thing called "Noatrun". Well, I downloaded some MP-3's from my little Creative Labs MuVo, and tried to play them. First thing Noatrun tells me is that the "MP3 Plug-in is not installed". WTF? The most common type of music file isn't already loaded? So I tried another package called simply- "Music Player". Again, no go, so I opened up a dialog to configure it. Here, MP3 isn't even a choice! All it's good for is CD Audio, WAV and Ogg-Vorbis! I went back to Noatrun, opened the configuration diaog, and even though it had said "MP3 not installed", it doesn't appear to provide any direct way to install a plug-in of any kind.

So next, I put a DVD loaded with a bunch of WAV files I had recorded from my vinyl collection into the DVD multi-drive. Nothing happened. Oh yeah- this is Linux- ya gotta "mount" everything. So I right clicked "mount", then all the files appeared. OK, so now let's see if Noatrun will play these. I browsed it through to my WAV folder, clicked "select all" and then "play". Noatrun tried to start, but then immdiately stopped. Damn! Well, what about a plain old Audio CD? I pushed the eject button on the DVD drive. Nothing happened. Oh yeah, this is Linux- ya gotta unmount everything. So I clicked "unmount". Disked stopped spinning. THen I pressed the eject button again. Nothing happened. Oh yeah- this is Linux... so I right clicked the Icon, clicked on eject and out came my WAV DVD, and in went my Patsy Cline plain ol' CD. The Icon displayed a little music note beside it, then started to play. Great- so at least Linux is a CD player. So, enough of Patsy- let's see if my WAV files work now. I pressed the eject button- whoops, almost forgot- right click, then eject. I put the WAV disk back in, mounted it, then opened Noatrun and clicked on "Play". And guess what it played? Patsy Cline!!! Patsy wasn't even in the player, but she crooned on anyhow! I tried stopping the player, opened the play-list and clicked on one of my WAV files. This time, I saw the selector move down the list all by itself, right back to Patsy. Now I'm geting it- Linus Torvoold is a real Patsy Cline fan!

Finally, I tried to see if Music Player would play my WAV's. This time I transferred all the WAV files to a HD folder and imported that into Music Player. It showed all the file names but they were all greyed out, and simply would not play. I tried Noatrun again, after deleting Patsy Cline off the list, pointed it to my WAV folder. This time it found all the WAV files- they were not grayed out, so I simply pointed the mouse to one of the files, then clicked on "Play". Again, it tried to start, but immediately stopped.

So what's going on here guys? I know Linux isn't necessarily easy, but c'mon- this is pretty basic stuff. With Win XP, everything just works, and works well. Why can't Linux now be the same after all these years? Am I missing something here?

Dave