i have an hp mini with atom processor (i586) running desktop suse 11 with 0 patches. my uses for this machine are just personal things. what i find is that i can’t stream video or music from other machines in the house. any applications i try to load won’t work. examples are vlc,wine,calibre. so my question is will the upgrades help me to load these progeams. i hear theres even a service pack 3. do these upgrades help with multimedia applications?
Service Pack 3 is not released yet, but it is imminent. I’m not sure exactly how you need to do the update for a HP machine as HP shipped SLED along with additional repos for drivers. You may not be able to update to SP3 until HP update those repos. That was true for SP2.
The reason you can’t play the videos or music is probably because you do not have the required codecs. I do not expect SP3 to include any more codecs than previous releases of SLED 11 did. VLC includes lots of codecs so plays just about everything. You can add VLC to SLED, e.g. via packman repos, but you will probably have hard time finding a repo for SLED 11 GA because it went End of Life in December 2010. What I do to get additional codecs for SLED is to add them so they can be used by Totem (or anything else which uses gstreamer backend, such as Banshee). I can then play H264/AAC, DVDs and lots of other common formats. I wrote an article about it for SLED 11 SP1 which is here, (for some reason it’s wrongly attributed to someone else - I’ll have to get that fixed), and once SP3 comes out I’ll be posting an updated version for SLED 11 SP3.
I agree I don’t want to go beyond support. you mention you have service pack 1. I don’t even have that. my firefox is outdated. it didn’t update either. will service pack one update the firefox browser. everything works on the machine its just not taking any change. I do agree the codex is missing so multimedia is out. I don’t want to upgrade and have a brick.
I’m actually running Service Pack 2. Service Pack 1 is End Of Life. Service Pack 2 has Firefox ESR 17 which is currently supported by Mozilla. (ESR is Extended Support Release.)
I’m afraid I can’t provide much advice on how you should update because you’re using a HP machine. HP ship machines with SLED plus additional repositories to provide hardware support so updating isn’t the same as a regular SLED install. There is a thread about HP users and SP2 here so I advise looking at that. If in doubt, contact HP.
you are right… they say if i force service pack 2 i could lose wifi. hp is working on putting it on a 64 bit machine and writing drivers for that. this is the information i was looking for. it seems i need to leave this unit alone. novel upgrades will not work with this hp hardware. unless hp writes drivers for it. i need to ask them. thanks
Hi
AFAIK, it’s a broadcom device? You may find rebuilding the packman
wl-broadcom package will work on the later kernels.
But if they are working on an update, it may pay to wait…
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Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 12.3 (x86_64) Kernel 3.7.10-1.11-desktop
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