Test Driving RealPlayer 10 for Linux
The recent announcement of RealPlayer 10 for Linux caught my eye and I decided it was worth taking it for a test drive. Since I was not sure how this might impact my production machines I decided to just slap a new instance of Slackware 10 on a spare partition of my test box. My main linux machines all run Slackware and Dropline Gnome so it seemed best to work with a 'plain vanilla' clean install.
My test box is a home built Abit AI7 mb, Pentium4 2.4GHz, 512MB ddr, 60GB Maxtor, Geforce3 ti500 video; my trusty old Ensoniq 5880 audio card; and nice high-speed cable broadband. I already have Slack 10 running in another partition on this machine with RealPlayer8 so I can compare the new and old on the same hardware.
My main concern about the new RealPlayer10 (RP10) was that it might break some of my older scripts and applications that I use to rip ogg audio files. I decided to take the full leap and loaded the Slack 10 CD's optional 2.6.7 kernel, Gnome 2.6.2, new Alsa 1.0.5 drivers, the latest Nvidia 1.0-6111 driver, GCC 3.3.4, and Mozilla 1.7. Install went smooth and I chose not to do any of my usual final configuration tweaks.
