recording

SLED 11 RC 4 first glance

For everyone who is looking for the next release of the SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop SLED 11 RC 4 is available here. While I usually prefer CentOS my current contract is to support SLES and SLED.

It has some pleasant surprised compared to recent releases of Ubuntu and and even openSuSE 11.*. Sound and sound recording work out of the box for the snd_hda_intel sound module. I’m referring here mostly to Skype users who have suffered numerous problems with the microphone and recording when using this module. I installed the Skype static application, adjusted the settings in Skype and it hasn’t failed.

This version also includes Moonshine, the Windows Media player for Linux. This makes it incredibly easy to play your WMV files for those of you who suffer people sending you files in that format to play.

What is not included are the development files for many of the applications. gcc and make are installed by default just not the development files. Working around this is simply a matter of adding the openSuSE 11 or 11.1 repository. You should then be able to get the *-devel files that you need. Note that you might need to downgrade the base application and minor version number. I haven’t broken anything doing this though.

In summary you are probably going to like this version of SLED particularly if you are a heavy multimedia user. I know it has certainly solved a few of my problems in that area.

Have fun!

-j

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