One of the the things that has always bugged me about fedora is some of their rigid policies concerning proprietary codecs such as MP3s. Granted Debian’s policies are nealy as restrictive, but relatively easy to get around if you so desire. A good example of this contrast between the two distributions’ policies is with the EasyTag package which allows me to manage the id3 tags for my MP3 collection. In Debian I only have to install the proper codecs and libraries from a third party source. In Fedora, they have gone to the level of not compiling their EasyTag package with mp3 support. The solution I found was the following command (which takes EasyTag from their unstable branch).

as root:

yum –enablerepo=rawhide –disableplugin=protectbase update easytag