Re: Any Sarge/Testing APT sources that have stuff like mplayer

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 19:03, Kyle Pointer wrote:
> Any one know of any servers that I can use as an APT source to get 
> packages like mplayer blackdown java all that jaz?
>        -- Kyle

Actually, official Debian doesn't provide most of those packages, just
unofficial Debian repositories (although is Blackdown in official?). 
But there are several unofficial ones that do.

<Second Hand Knowledge=ON>
I've heard Christian Marillat's APT repository is the best for
multimedia and other DPKG packages:  http://marillat.free.fr/  
Alternatively:  ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/  
</Second Hand Knowledge>

[ NOTE:  I don't have enough current (i.e., last 18 months) experience
with Debian, virtually none on corporate networks in that time, to
comment further.  Most of my Debian installs over the last 18 months
have been Xandros releases.  So this is purely _second_hand_. ]

There is always http://www.apt-get.org , but I recommend you stick to
_trusted_ repositories and not arbitrary ones.  Do this _regardless_ of
your distro or front-end method and don't blindly add anything to your
sources.list without considering possible quality/conflict issues.

> ( recently switched to debian, freedom free *and* beer free )

It's the same thing on other distros, be it Red Hat, Mandrake, etc...
There are official APT/YUM/URPMI/etc... repositories and unofficial.
I.e., what were you using before?

If Red Hat, you can always use Livna.ORG, which has all of the former
Fedora Project (before the Red Hat takeover) packages such as MPlayer,
XMMS-MP3, etc... that have been moved out of Fedora Extras as a result.

Just be careful where you use it.  As an Enterprise admin, I had to give
people an earful when they used a Knoppix or other LiveCD on their
corporate desktop.  A lot of Knoppix variants include a lot of
unlicensed commercial binaries -- and I'm not talking simple click
through licensed software.

As a good friend and fellow Debian advocate/maintainer once said ...

  "This is a freedomware [redistribution] issue that has to be handled
   by each of the distributors (Debian, Fedora, Mandrake, etc)."

It's not a Debian is better thing, although Debian _does_ have, by far,
the largest selection of both official and unofficial repositories for
packages.  "Free Beer" and well as "Illegal Beer" is available for all
distributions, through automated, distributed methods like APT, YUM,
URPMI, etc...


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                    b.j.smith@ieee.org 
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Subtotal Cost of Ownership (SCO) for Windows being less than Linux
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) assumes experts for the former, costly
retraining for the latter, omitted "software assurance" costs in 
compatible desktop OS/apps for the former, no free/legacy reuse for
latter, and no basic security, patch or downtime comparison at all.




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