Linux: Codecs, Proprietary Drivers & Hassle

I'm currently playing around with linux distros trying to find one that suites me. I've a collection of coverdisks from linux mags, and I'm to-ing and fro-ing, installing the various flavours on my new computer. But I'm finding it *very* frustrating.

Vista

First of all, the box came with Vista pre-installed. And whatever else can be said about micros~1 - Vista looks great! But I like my command line, so I reduced the Vista partition; created a few new ones and installed Ubuntu 7.04.

Ubuntu vs Media

My first impressions was that Ubuntu looks fairly ugly - or maybe 'old' is a better word - compared to Vista. Ubuntu catches up with the 3D desktop effects, and after installing NVIDIA's proprietary drivers from the "Restricted Drivers" tool, everything was running smoothly.

That was until I tried to play MP3's and the video tutorials from the guitar mag coverdisks I've lying around. Unsucessfully - although in fairness Vista doesn't play MPEG4's or MOVs out of the box either. I've no internet connection at home, so I can't use the automatic download tools to fetch the codecs. Hunting around on the net gave me no clues on what packages to download - and even if I fire up Synaptic and ask it to write a download script I've still no idea what to ask it to download.

LinuxMint vs Drivers

Then I heard of LinuxMint with it's bundled codecs. So I ordered it from On-Disk and was pleased to see it arrive after only 4 days or so. I much prefer the colour scheme, but again, things like the (IMHO) very poor icons make it look a bit rusty. The mintMenu is fairly cool and friendlier that Ubuntu's two-panel approach. But LinuxMint doesn't come with the *&^%£€<¹!¡ NVIDIA drivers!!


I'm going to have to stop being such a tight-arse and get my home computer wired up to the web. Or wait until NVIDIA open-source their drivers...

Getting SQLite Working

Steps I needed to go through to be able to use SQLite in my python programs. This was on my linux box, I haven't tried it on my micros~1 laptop...

1. Download python2.5 and compile. This has the sqlite3 module built in - but it's only a wrapper!
   
2. Download and compile sqlite3. Initial trials bombed out when looking for 'tcl.h'. I don't need TCL bindings, so a quick look on the sqlite wiki says to 'configure --disable-tcl'. This seemed to do the trick.
3. As Python only includes the wrapper for sqlite, I needed to run the setup.py script again so that Python knows where to find the sqlite executable. I needed to hack the setup.py because I'm not installing sqlite in the usual place.
   To do this, I searched setup.py for sqlite3 and added the sqlite build directory path to sqlite_inc_paths - it'll pick up sqlite3.h here. Then, I added os.path.join(sqlite_incdir, '.libs') to the sqlite_dirs_to_check list - my libraries were linked into bld/.libs
4. Running Python again and doing a 'import sqlite3' is quiet - which means no errors! Job done.