CargoBay

Back to business. So what has been done during the summer? More operating system has been evaluated, more specificly CentOS which is a RedHat based OS as Fedora but not directly supported by the "prominent north american vendor" as it's called in "centos-language". Also I have had a look at a new media player, as VLC has somewhat strayed from the clean and simple interface with a maximum off support for different codecs. The new one is MPlayer which has a long history good support and a clean code. The fact is that VLC has depended on the MPlayer project and their implementations of codecs for their on player, so it's just one step closer to the source.

The main purpose behind MPlayer has been the client/server model. In fact, it has no "default interface" but a extensive API that other GUI's can connect to and control the playback. This is probably a very new experience for most users, and it takes a while to come to terms with. But in the end you get a clean quick media player and depending on your distribution(debian, redhat etc) support for all codecs that is possible independant of their license.

Next in line was the CentOS distribution, which is a direct clone of the RHEL releases which currently is at number 5. The only difference between the two is the branding and naming. It's a distribution aimed at people who want to use RedHat but don't want to pay for the support. They usually lag about 4-10 weeks in releases of RHEL, but in the grand scheme of things that's not to long. My interest in CentOS is mainly to run a Zimbra server with all the bells and whistles that come with it. More on that subject later.

In conclusion ladies and jelly-spoons. Have a try with MPlayer you might like it ;)