[IRJustman]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

As WK said, you'll need to have additional repositories enabled to obtain the licensed or otherwise dicey parts like codecs or libdvdcss. My copy of Ubuntu 8.10 had the non-free repository already enabled (rather surprisingly if you ask me*).

Every copy of Ubuntu Server and Kubuntu has had it enabled that I've seen. However, for stuff which has patents or worse, the law, keeping it from being used either legally (patents) or at all (the law) and some seriously non-free stuff (like anything from Adobe) require you to have put in the Medibuntu sources.

Most any modern Linux distribution includes a number of torrent clients; I use deluge because it's pretty lightweight, though nothing beats ctorrent in that department.

Actually, rtorrent is my favorite console-mode BitTorrent client. It's very similar to Vuze (nee Azureus) and muTorrent in that you can get a LOT of stats on your torrents in addition to a lot of other features you've come to take for granted in a graphical client. I just wish it had a plugin architecture like Vuze does, which would give me a reason to kill X on my fileserver (it's a headless machine, so I use the VNC X server to use any graphical programs).

Who maintains the nonfree Ubuntu repositories anyway? I'm only acquainted with the Fedora world, where the repositories are maintained by volunteers and hosted outside the US. I've noticed that you can download proprietary items in Ubuntu restricted from servers whose names start with "us." A quick DNS search told me that us.archive.ubuntu.com is actually hosted in Poland on servers in the canonical.com domain.[/size]

I don't know whether you're talking about the "non-free" meaning non-free stuff or Medibuntu. They are different in content and purpose.

The "non-free" repository stated in /etc/apt/sources.list only contains items whose licensing is at odds with the DFSG along with the "contrib" repository which includes FOSS software which rely on items in non-free. The Medibuntu repository deals with software which includes several normal closed-source freebs like Acrobat Reader and the Flash Plugin along with Free/Open Source Software which embodies concepts which are ether protected by patent (e.g. MPEG decoding software) or forbidden by law (DeCSS)

As for Fedora, the last time I ever used it, it just about made me want to slit my wrists. I absolutely hated it. The netinstall was needlessly difficult in that it required me to know beforehand a URL for a YUM repository. It didn't even have a preset list of mirrors like Ubuntu has. Since I was building a server to do some hacking, I told it to not install GNOME or X--which it happily did anyway, but left unconfigured. That's on top of my outright distaste for RPM to begin with. Needless to say, I'm never using Fedora again or anything derived from Red Hat's distributions.

Originally Posted by Wordplay

Same goes for Linux, which is also too technical to be convinient.

Have you even tried Linux in any flavor at all? It sounds like you're a candidate for Ubuntu or its other desktop derivatives.

--Ian.