The Unofficial Fedora Core FAQ has a section on how to install prebuilt packages for various things that can't be shipped as part of Fedora Core, like MP3 players and binary graphics card drivers. I've always ignored it, installing what I needed by hand; user-friendly installs aren't necessarily very sysadmin friendly, and I never felt like taking the risk. (I deal with enough badly packaged RPMS as it is.)

But one of the advantages of scratch installs on new machines is that I don't have to care how messed up they get; they're perfect for wild experiments. So that's why I spent part of today trying out installing things the easy way, starting with the ATI binary drivers for the machine's X800 graphics card and going onwards to various media players.

Amusingly, the ATI binary driver runs glxgears so fast that the gears seem to turn slowly. At first I thought that I wasn't actually getting hardware accelerated 3D; only seeing the frames per second numbers that glxgears prints convinced me. (I suppose I should actually see what the software 3D performance numbers are for comparison.)

The results with the various media player bits are more inconclusive, partly because Totem still has a death grip on every media type in sight in Gnome (and doesn't have enough codec plugins).

(If Totem wants to insist on handling pure audio types, the least it could do is not still have a huge black video area in its window while playing them.)