Adventures in Switching to Linux

So tonight I am rocking the laptop and I want to watch a DVD. My laptop is a hand-me-down from my wife. It is a Dell Inspiron 8600, Pentium M 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM, nVidia GeForce FX Go5200 64M video card and all installed on a 16GB extended partition. With a little more RAM (and not that stupid, crappy, terrible, horrible, POS, no good Broadcom BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller - but more on that later), I think it would be about perfect.

So how to watch a DVD? Well, being in the US, I am pretty sure I can't legally watch 99% of the DVDs I own (ie - movies I exchanged money to get) as long as I am running Linux. Sure I could always boot into Windows but the end game is to reclaim that Windows partition for Linux. So as all other Linux users wanting to watch something they've legally paid for, I show my symbolic middle finger by moving ahead with my plan.

From my research in the past, I haven't had much luck finding some legal DVD playing software for Linux. I found a few products but none are actual players.

• CyberLink PowerCinema Linux - All I can find here are news releases. Even searching for "cyberlink linux buy" or "cyberlink linux purchse" doesn't return anything. Even if this was a real product that I really could buy, the features sound like way more than I am interested in. I just want a simple DVD player application, nothing more.
• LinDVD - Another application that sounds like a great thing like in this April 2000 press release. It was made by a company called InterVideo which has since been purchased by Corel (Remember Word Perfect? It does still exist.). Well even when the product still existed, it was really sounds more like something only for developers of Linux based media center software. That doesn't help me any either.

So after all this writing, I haven't actually gotten to the point to try and get a DVD playing so I think I'll work on that now before I have to go to bed. Look for what I did later in I want to watch my DVDs! (Part 2).