Niels Christian's blog

Here is a little update on my Ubuntu adventure. I have now been using Ubuntu on my laptop for more than one month. Mainly it has been for surfing on the Internet and watching movies and listening to music.

Back on my windows system I have used Firefox, VLC and Winamp for these issues. Luckily, both Firefox and VLC is cross platform compatible (compiled for both systems), which means I only had to find a new music player. Firefox was preinstalled in Ubuntu and VLC was not, but was easily installed via the add/remove utility. The standard movie player in Ubuntu is something called Totem Movie Player. I didn’t wanna spend any time on this application, but before I installed VLC I tried watching movies in it, but it required a lot of codecs installed separately. Thats why I then installed VLC, it requires no codecs and plays almost every video format. No problems in that.

About the music player, I had to find a one that suited me. One is called xmms, it is a lot like Winamp, I have tried it out from previous experiences with the linux platform. It’s not bad. The standard music player in Ubuntu is called Rythmbox. It reminds me of apples iTunes. Back in Windows I tried iTunes once. I never liked it, it messed up the files and directories and stuff. As I used Winamp I also used the plugin it has for my iPod. It has only the most necessary functions for managing music on the iPod, which is moving files from your PC to the device and vice versa.

With Rythmbox It’s so much better. It is probably like iTunes(never tried iTunes with my iPod). With Rythmbox I can play my music directly from my iPod, I can sort by album, artist, song, title and more. Import the music you have on you harddrive and you can manage it. It gives a good overview of your music and is really organised. And it does not move your files around the hard drive.

So I will stick with these programs, though there are many others, but I am more satisfied with this setup in Ubuntu than the setup I had in Windows. So far so good.