well chaps i thought i must share this with you.

knoppix helped me climb out of the ms mire and really understand finally (after 15 years or so of being an IT bod) what a real os was all about.

and its to knoppix (and debian) that i consider myself loyal to.

however i have read many times comments in these forums like "knoppix is good, but you need a real distro like fedora...etc".

so i tried it.

i cut my teeth on knoppix for 6 months, therefore i am ready for a "big boy distro" ..... like fedora!

so i got a dvd of fedora core 4 (from a magazine) and installed it on my test machine.

nightmare.

the installation failed one the first try (somthing that i rememeber from the old red hat days) and then finally went in.

the "oohs" and "ahhs" started then, first time using gnome, nice and fast boot up, shut down fast too.

after 2 horus i had the network sorted, mail, samba shares, ftp, printers, it was all so good.

yes i thought, finally a "big boy" distro.

now lets play some music while i configure the last few remaining items...... "what, no mp3 support?"

thats true fellas, no mp3 support or in fact mpeg of any type!

out of the box?

no surely.

yes surely.

due to patent issues the ability to play mpeg or mp3 files has been removed from fedora.

now i struggle with this for say 3 hours and in the end get it somewhere close, however due to the deliberate crippling of fedora core 4 to inhibit the playing of mp3 files (due to quite understanable leagal issues mind) the distro to me is unreliable and useless from a media point of view.

how can someone make the decision to prevent the most popular music (and video) format unplayable out of the box?

knoppix, feather, dsl, xandros and many othes all do this most basic function without even batting an eyelid.

to get mp3 playback support it means changing the sources for yum (apt-get) and then removing old crippled media players, then installing new ones, text files, config files altered etc!

as far as i am concerned (and this is purely my opinion based on my needs) i love knoppix, its a cracking desktop, does all i need and is the perfect platform for learning, it you hit the most basic of stumbling blocks early on it stops you in your tracks and prevents further learning.

if fedora core 4 was the first distro i had of tried then i would have been a very dissapointed ms junkie to this very day.

give me knoppix any day.

rant over.

reagrds to you all.

steve.