I was asked recently about how long it might take for me to push out the Fedora review and at present, it is still being tested, only being pushed off by the fact that I’ve been having a near constant work week at the store I work for, and until next week, when I have a few days off in a row, will I be able to finish up the review. I must say, for a distribution that in the past has never worked out the way I had hoped, it has gotten a lot better. The documentation is a lot cleaner then it was at previous as well as the system itself becoming simpler. I’ll be sure to cover more next week once the review is finished.

However, I did receive a rather interesting email yesterday, asking me how to set up DVD playback under Linux, seeing as the person wanted to watch the DVD copy of My Name Is Khan they had bought a little while ago. And while I’m aware Linux Mint has DVD playback installed right away, they are using Ubuntu 10.04, and are enjoying it, so I couldn’t tell them to go to Mint. Telling someone to go to a different OS when something works for them is an extremely foolish thing to do if you ask me. So today, I’m going to show you how you can set up Linux to work with any DVD out of the box.

The only thing you have to do really is add in a repository for Ubuntu and install the playback/codec that you need for Ubuntu or Salix. Since most people I know use Ubuntu or Linux Mint, these steps remain the same. Open up the terminal, then copy and paste the following line:

sudo wget –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get –quiet update && sudo apt-get –yes –quiet –allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

What this does is that it adds the repository as well as the GPG key that says it can be trusted and installed from. This is only for Ubuntu and spinoffs of Ubuntu, seeing as Salix has the component we need in their default repositories. Before closing the terminal, issue this command:

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 w32codecs -y

which will then install the DVD playback as well as media playback of non-standard formats.

If you’re using Salix, it’s even simpler then that. Open up Gslapt, and install libdvdcss (which you’ll notice is exactly what you have to install in Ubuntu), then open up your video player of choice and slip your DVD in. It really is that simple to have DVD playback in Linux, like what you’re used to in Windows. This will also allow you to have any front end you’d like to rip your DVD as well if you’d like to do that too. My personal choice for DVD and video playback is VLC Player, but I know some people who are happy with Totem and MPlayer, so in the end, whatever you choose, now has the ability to play back your DVDs. And to the writer of the email, I have this to say: as someone who enjoyed My Name Is Khan, I hope you enjoy it just as much as I did, it was quite a tearjerker!

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