Previously on this blog, I've bemoaned the absence of information on running multimedia in Debian. In
January 2010 I wrote:
My experience with Debian was made more difficult than it needed to be
because there was no multimedia installation page provided by Debian to
refer to- I had to get information from a lot of different pages, many
of them blogs or Linux resources rather than Debian pages.
And in
May 2010:
There's no equivalent of Ubuntu's restricted-extras
package in Debian, which makes enabling multimedia less of a breeze. I
got Flash and MP3's playing without too much trouble, but playing Flash
files I'd saved to my hard drive resulted in an error message. With a
bit of Googling, I found I just needed to install a Gstreamer plugin. Not too much of a big deal, but just another issue that would be off-putting for a newbie.
Debian
generally doesn't go out of its way like Ubuntu to be user friendly or
attractive- a lot of features that are enabled by default in Ubuntu are
not present in Debian. They can be enabled, but it takes some Googling,
some head scratching and some delving into system settings.
I noted in the January post that work was going on to make multimedia in Debian easier, and I'm pleased to say that after my recent Debian Wheezy install, I came across this excellent
Debian Wiki multimedia page which made installing multimedia a breeze.
No comments:
Post a Comment