Dangers of being on the Iceberg

Things have gotten better, but historically, turning to Linux as your workstation had certain dangers! The greatest of these dangers, is multi-media. Windows rules Media. And you think to yourself, that's no big deal until your are stranded and can't get information because of Windows media files aren't supported by your browser!

I had this happen during one of the Fire Evacuations, just a few years ago. A website of locals had a scanner system setup to pass through the web. But I couldn't get to it, so I had to watch the transcripts. And there apparently was a transcriber, who took a Monday Night Football break. I'm worried about my house burning down, and he's watching football, but at least he was honest about it, and that was a normal Monday night blow-out, so I'm certain the right team won! Anyway, with this weeks events more California Forests going up in flames, brought those memories flooding back.

The first thing to do, about getting off the iceberg is to install the VLC media player, and make it the default application for media. Newer version of that has a Firefox plug-in. Which install itself quite seamlessly.

Second thing to do, is install Java Run Time. Which now has a plug-in for Firefox. So install it, go to a Java website (java.com) and go to the page of how do I know it's working. And watch to see if it doesn't tell you now, that you need to install a plug-in. I realized that you are now trained to ignore this missing plug in request, so look carefully for it. If Java is working the page is quite animated, and it's unmistakable. If it's not working, it's actually hard to tell, because it's just a page full of words, with no broken icon there or anything? So feel around in the dark, and get that fully installed, and functional!

Ubuntu comes fairly complete with support for Shockwave/Flash files already installed. Fedora, you might have to make a trip to Firefox.com, and go to the plug-ins page first.

Between Java, VLC, and the Adobe media plug-ins, you wont be stranded afar as I was in my last evacuation, no matter what? I'm still just as stumped as anyone else about how to play a movie from a DVD in Linux, but at least this will handle 99% of your portability problems, with media!