Today, after many years of hard work from many people, ZFS for Linux finally entered Debian. The package status can be seen on the package tracker for zfs-linux. and the team status page. If you want to help out, please join us. The source code is available via git on Alioth. It would also be great if you could help out with the dkms package, as it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.
Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in Debian claim support for most file formats.
A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian Edu. I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser plugin supported most file formats / media types. The result can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have not been updated for a while. But browser plugins are less relevant these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone players.
A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why. The cause is a missing MIME type in the VLC desktop file. In the process I wrote a script to compare the set of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin, only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the two for VLC. This discovery made me dig up the script I used to compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian support most file formats.
The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as a table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included in the table, with the package supporting most MIME types being listed first in the table.
The best multimedia player in Debian? It is totem, followed by parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and kmplayer. Time for the other players to update their announced MIME support?The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5" LCD touch screen. The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests confirming this. The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before production started.
As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with Debian. Please let me know if you know of any others. Is it the first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?
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