Omega 10 Live CD Beta: Fedora With Added Multimedia

AN interesting new Linux project was released last week. Omega 10 cuts through the old debate about free/proprietary software with a solution I am sure many will find appealing - and just as many will abhor.

But first, some background. The Fedora project is well known for its uncompromising stance on software which is patent-encumbered or proprietary: if it fits either of those definitions, it does not get into Fedora. Neither will the Fedora developers help their users include software which falls into either category.
In some ways this is an admirable, ethical stance but to those who are new to Linux in general and Fedora in particular, it seems baffling and unhelpful.

These are the people who, having taken the bold step to convert from Windows or Mac OS, find themselves unable to do all the things they previously took for granted without having to tangle with multimedia codec installations.

A similar thing happened to me in my early days of using Linux: Why was this distribution thought of so highly when I could not listen to my (legally owned) music nor view half of the things I wished to see on the internet? With Fedora 10 now at beta stage, this thorny issue has been tackled by the Red Hat community engineer behind the Fedora games and Fedora Xfce media spins, Rahul Sundaram.

Just a few days ago, Rahul announced the release of Omega 10 Beta, an installable live CD/desktop remix of Fedora 10 but with immediate access to and packages from the Livna RPM repository. (Get it here: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-September/msg00015.html)

"Livna", incidentally, is an anagram of "Anvil," which is the internet handle of Damien Nade, the French programmer who maintains rpm.livna.org. What Livna does is distribute that software which Fedora will not because it violates either Fedora's free software philosophy or American law. Such a package would be 'libdvdcss', which is required to watch DVDs but which, it may be argued, violates the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

So, what this development means to us as users is that, for the first time, we have a version of Fedora which plays multimedia out of the box and, if Omega 10 does not already contain the codecs we require, they are a short download away from the Livna repository.

From the Omega 10 release notes, we learn:

"Because it includes all the gstreamer and xine codecs and many multimedia players including VLC and Mplayer out of the box, all the codecs including MP3 files files would just work. No proprietary applications or drivers are installed by default. They are, however, available in the repository and just a yum install away."

I was interested to hear Rahul's reasoning for Omega 10 when I stumbled upon these comments on a Fedora discussion:

"There is a difference between proprietary software and potentially patent encumbered software. The former is a philosophical issue while the latter is a legal issue (at least for distributions based in the US). Putting them in the same bucket is not appropriate.

Omega does not install proprietary applications or drivers. What it does install are codecs and multimedia players, all of them are under free and open source software.

To make this distinction clear, rpmfusion has two different repositories - free and non-free. When Omega switches to using rpmfusion (livna will have a migration path before shutting down), the software components installed by default will be from the free repository.

The non-free repository will be available but nothing from there is installed out of the box. This is for two reasons. There is a potential legal issue with bundling proprietary drivers. There is also the technical issue that installing drivers for hardware when it is not required causes breakage..."

Intrigued by this latest development, I decided to take Omega 10 for a spin. It proved to be an interesting experience - and changed my whole view of Fedora. Where previously I have always been impressed by its professional look and performance, I have always been put off using it on a more permanent basis by the amount of user intervention required to make it do what so many other, equally good, distributions do from the outset.

I tried Omega 10 as a live CD with my Dell Latitude X1 laptop - it is not the most powerful machine in the world, with a 1.1GHz Pemtium M processor, 512MB of RAM, Intel PRO/Wireless networking, 12inch screen offering 1280x800 widescreen resolution, external USB DVD/CD-RW and
30GB HDD.

The first run took an eternity before I had a working desktop - without a shadow of doubt, this was the slowest boot/load I have ever experienced, well over 5 minutes! Plus, once the GNOME 2.23.92 desktop loaded, I experienced four or five errors as various GNOME panel applets failed to load (a subsequent reboot ran perfectly smoothly, by the way).My sound was configured and running, the screen resolution was almost correct - 1280x768 - and after entering my wireless network details in the excellent Network Manager I had wi-fi access to my router. All in all, not a bad start.

Incidentally, while configuring my wireless network I noticed Network Manager has a tab for setting up Mobile Broadband which, given my recent acquisition of a Huawei E220 USB dongle, is a very welcome development.(see: http://reddevil62-techhead.blogspot.com/2008/08/stuff-that-works-with-linux-3.html)

There is a decent selection of packages in Omega 10: GIMP; Empathy Internet Messenger; Firefox; Transmission; Abiword; Evolution; Cheese (webcam utility); GNOME Mplayer; GXine; Pulse Audio; Rhythmbox; VLC and Xine. It was the multimedia packages I was most interested - time to put some to the test.

I copied a couple of files over from a USB memory stick (which was detected immediately and the Nautilus file manager launched) - my MP3 files played perfectly in Rhythbox and my .AVI copy of The Eye, starring the lovely Jessica Alba, played in VLC with no problems at all. By now, I was grinning - and Fedora users will know why.I wanted to run a couple of other multimedia tests on a more powerful desktop machine - it has an AMD Sempron 3800+ processor and 1.5GB of RAM with two DVD drives. On this machine Omega 10 loaded much quicker, the sound and screen resolution (1280x1024) were perfect and my wired network was automatically configured.

Apple movie trailers played in Firefox using the pre-installed GNOME MPlayer plugin without any problems. However, when I tried to listen to live streamed radio from the BBC Radio 5 live website the plugin repeatedly crashed, taking the Firefox browser down with it.I put a retail DVD (The Bourne Ultimatum) into my second drive and tried to play it with VLC and Movie Player, both of which crashed repeatedly, but the move did play, albeit in a somewhat jumpy manner, in GNOME Mplayer.

While these multimedia experiences are not exactly perfect, they are not bad and certainly no worse than my experiences with distributions which tout themselves first and foremost as multimedia systems - and bearing in mind Fedora's reputation for being multimedia-unfriendly, this is surely a major improvement (depending, of course, on your philosophical point of view!).

I shall be keeping a close eye on the progress of Omega 10 in the coming weeks as it, and Fedora 10, approach final release stage. Omega's more relaxed approach to codecs etc could well see it enjoying a surge in popularity similar to that which has seen Linux Mint (often referred to as "Ubuntu done right") soar into the top five of Distrowatch's unofficial popularity rankings.

We shall see, we shall see...