"Over and over and over again, my friend..."
The good news? He was wrong in 1965.
The bad? He's relevant right now.
Barry McGuire on Australian TV in 2008--you know the tune:
The bad? He's relevant right now.
Barry McGuire on Australian TV in 2008--you know the tune:
Comments
Trivia: In The Mamas and The Papas' hit Creeque Alley, the McQuire refered to is Barry McQuire:
McGuinn and McGuire just a-gettin' higher in L.A.,
You know where that's at.
And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass.
Eric, this comment has been brought to you by UNR, currently running in "try it" mode. No media plugin to see what this post is referring to.
I believe with UNR/UNE that they've made arrangements to get most common proprietary codecs clearly and legally incorporated into the OS.
The tricky thing is that some codecs--MP3 is the most notorious, probably--are proprietary and licensed. Using a free OS, your right to use these codecs without payment technically depends on where you live--in the U.S., you're not legally supposed to have them unless licensed to (if you have a legal copy of Windows, you have a license to use the MP3 codec via Microsoft). Of course, the Internet is kinda international, so you get into sort of a grey area pretty quickly--there's nothing to keep you from using the MP3 codec without a license and it's not really clear Fraunhofer, which owns the codec, has recourse if you do.
Again, I believe Canonical (which distributes Ubuntu) may have a deal with Fraunhofer and others that moots this.
The easiest way to get grey/black plugins, in my opinion, is to install a lovely piece of software called Ubuntu Tweak that gives you a ton of easy ways to, well, tweak. UT includes a page containing a checklist of repositories (software distribution channels), including the Medibuntu repository (free and non-free media codecs for reading music and video files).
A bit off my own topic, which indeed was Barry McGuire's "Eve," but hope it was helpful/enlightening, Tom!
I'm familiar with the legalities of codex licenses, but your discussion was helpful. Maybe I'll stop hijacking your thread and just start my own... Nah, that wouldn't be in the tradition of the UCF.
I'm liking this enough to do the install. But I really want to find out about backing up[ the
Win7, or being able to revert somehow. A previous HP had a Tools partition that could restore to "as purchased." There is a Tools partition on this thing, so maybe that will do what I want. Anyway, I do like this distro. Thanks a bunch!
Out of curiosity, how big is your hard drive? I have to wonder if you have enough space on there to try a dual-boot? There are some issues with the newest bootloader (GRUB2) getting tetchy with recognizing Windows partitions, but it might be something to look at or ask Shawn about.
My helpfulness on a single-drive dual-boot is limited; my dual-boot system has two physically distinct hard drives, so I never had to deal with resizing a Windows partition, etc. I've seen it listed as an option running the Ubuntu installer, I just don't know how easy it is or how well it works....