Ubuntu 8.04 rant: Getting MP3s to play is too fundamental to be left up to geekery

(Begin rant.)

I thought the deal with Ubuntu — at least in the 8.04+ era anyway — was that if you tried to play a not-totally-free form of multimedia, the system would open up a window asking you whether or not you wished to download a proprietary codec or some other form of nastiness to facility the playing of such verboten media.

And I even remember one time downloading a Quicktime movie on a Ubuntu box and having just this sort of dialog pop up, soon after which I was happily playing the video.

But today I decided to bring some podcasts into Ubuntu's Rhythmbox music player.

Yes, they were MP3s. If I had known that a friendly Ubuntu dialog box wouldn't pop up, and I'd have known beforehand that I had to dip into Add/Remove programs and add the "restricted extras," I would've done that.

Instead, I added my podcast feeds to Rhythmbox. (First of all, you have to find the feed on your own and add its RSS URL manually; that's not a deal-breaker, especially since the latest rendition of iTunes makes managing podcasts less fun than ever.)

So far, so good. Then I tried to actually play one of the .mp3 files. Nothing. No warning that says something like, "This is a restricted format, you free-software-hating pig, but if you wish to play it, click here and evil codecs will flow into your formerly pure Ubuntu system and you will be awash in .mp3 goodness."

OK, so it's clear that I'm not in the business of writing dialog boxes for Ubuntu.

But I had to resort to Google and find the customary five unhelpful Ubuntu Forums pages before I stumbled upon this page, which directed me to open up my repositories to include non-free software and then add ubuntu-restricted-extras with the Add/Remove Applications tool and then tried to play an MP3 again in both Rhythmbox and Totem.

Still nothing.

I rebooted the system.

Now I have MP3 support, everything plays fine, and all is (almost) all right in my Ubuntu world.

So is my question/problem the same as yours?

I hope so. I've been running Linux and BSD operating systems for about 2 1/2 years at this point, I've had to do a lot of hacking to get things working properly, and I understand that the average Linux or BSD system is not ready for new-user prime time. I know when things don't work that in many instances a little hacking around with a package manager, at the terminal or even (horror!) in the GUI itself will fix whatever happens to be broken.

Yeah, even Slackware isn't all that hard ... if you've been working at it. And while in Slackware you don't expect things to be easy, you are often surprised when it is.

But Ubuntu is supposed to be different. Maybe something got screwed up in this particular Ubuntu 8.04 installation, but I thought that at the very least an attempt to play an MP3 on a system without the proper codecs to do so would at the very least bring up a dialog box with some kind of direction as to what the next step would be.

Having NOTHING happen just isn't a good option if Ubuntu in particular, and Linux and other FOSS operating systems in general ever hope to bring non- or less-geeky users into the fold.

I'm a huge believer in the ogg audio format and in open media formats in general. And depending on how important that sort of thing is to you, I applaud the lengths the most fervent of us will go to in order to keep whatever degree of purity is in keeping with your own personal software philosophy.

I ran an OpenBSD system as my main desktop for a full six months. And before my audio hardware just plain broke, I knew that adding a GUI music player and the proper packages to play the various audio formats was something I needed to do. And I did just that. Getting xmms to play MP3 and OGG files was relatively easy, and nobody who runs OpenBSD expects "easy." (And for the purposes of this rant I'm ignoring the fact that X is pretty much broken on my Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop in OpenBSD 4.5 after having not a single problem with it in 4.4. And while I'm on that subject, I really miss running OpenBSD. I became quite accustomed to it, had done a lot of setup, and now getting segmentation faults and core dumps every time I run X has really shaken my faith in it as an OS.)

I know — I know — that if I or any user wants all the multimedia to work right away, there are always distros like Mint that can make it happen.

And Ubuntu already takes enough crap for not being as pure as Debian (which in turns takes crap for not being as pure as GNewSense).

But for a project/distro/movement that wants to preach not to the choir but instead to the unwashed, Windows-using masses, either let 'em play MP3s out of the box, make it easy to add that functionality (i.e. don't make 'em Google it, for heaven's sake) while at the same time educate them as to why MP3s, MOVs, Flash and all that other royalty-carrying, proprietary crap is bad, or just say right out front: "If you're geeky enough to figure out how to play multimedia, go ahead. But otherwise, reinstall Windows and everything will be fine."

It took a little more Googling before I figured out that merely opening up my repositories either in Add/Remove Programs or Synaptic (or directly in /etc/apt/sources.list) would be enough to get the automatic Ubuntu dialogs to pop up and ask me about restricted-media codecs.

So you have to KNOW you need a restricted driver before the system will prompt you to install one.

OK, I understand that Ubuntu/Canonical is treading a fine line with free-software purists, but in the minds of said purists, the distro has already crossed far over that line.

Here's what I think: Ubuntu should let new users who click on a restricted-media file know that there is indeed a way to play said file, even if they haven't yet opened up their repositories to non-free software. Only giving helpful information to people who really don't need that help is just not ... helpful.

I want ogg to succeed. And I also believe that Flash is the worst thing to happen to open-source software, freedom, security and everything else in the past five years. But with Linux and other free operating systems continuing to languish in the low single digits (some say 1 percent) of the market, not giving new users an easily made choice of what kinds of media they wish to play on their computers is no way to increase the uptake of free software among those who barely know what it is.

The people we need to bring over to free software wouldn't know "Debian" if it put on dark eyeshadow and started picking fights with too-close cousins on "Jerry Springer."

When a lifelong Windows user finds his or herself in a system awash in applications, icons and ways of doing things they've neither seen nor heard of, something like allowing them the choice of whether or not their music files will play is the least we can do to keep them from running away from the keyboard with their heads in their collective hands.

I hold Ubuntu up to a higher standard than I do almost any other Linux distribution or BSD project. That's because I think that Ubuntu is currently free software's best shot at breaking the Microsoft/Apple stranglehold on desktop computing.

I might even run GNewSense myself now that it supports my Ethernet card on my laptop. And I love the Debian Project, Slackware and OpenBSD. I'm getting ready to convert my now-testing laptop to NetBSD just to see how it performs in my work environment.

But when it comes to bringing new people into the free-software world, Ubuntu has a critical role. I think it's up there with Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice as one of the key pieces/collections of software that can change hearts and minds.

And a little help for new users when it comes to media files, even when it doesn't toe the free-software party line is, in my opinion, a very small price to pay for the opportunity to educate those users about the bigger, greater picture.

(End rant.)