I lot of distros like Sabayon and Linux Mint have a disclaimer against software licenses that are in the OS what does this mean and how does it effect me?

I'm not familiar with those distributions or of software license disclaimers in any Linux distribution. Here is one possibility, though. Some software like Adobe Acrobat Reader are proprietary but free to use. A lot of Linux distributions will not include those kinds of applications in their repositories or they will have a separate repository for the proprietary software. A lot of Linux people think that Linux systems should only have GPL licensed software. There is some question about whether it is even legal for a Linux distribution to include proprietary software in their distribution. Maybe that is what is behind the license disclaimers that you are seeing.

no, they say things about software patents and if your country inforces them?

Oh THAT!!!

That is because it is illegal to use some multimedia codecs in some countrries like the USA. The software that allows you to play a commercial DVD movie is illegal in the USA even though it is okay to have the same capability on Windows. I have a DVD player hooked to my television so I don't even want to play DVDs on my computer.

I'm not sure what you mean by

Perhaps you're thinking of the disclaimer that the software comes with no warranty or maybe a disclaimer about software patents, which is the reason some popular, but non-free formats are not included.

The Free Software Foundation has a useful page that will tell you more than you want to know about licenses.

Dennisk

Yea so that does effect me. So what should I do if I want to install one of those previously mentioned OS. Although I know that Mint has a "light" version.

You can install the operating system and just not use the multimedia codecs and libraries. That's what I do.

Or you could choose a distribution, such as Debian or OpenSuSE, that don't have that software in the first place.

Oh thanks. Is it obvious what they are? Or how can I find out what they are?

Does PCLinuxOS have any of these because this is the distro I may use.

PCLinuxOS has all of them.

OpenSuSE is the cleanest distro that I know of. Even if you install the multimedia stuff OpenSuSE will uninstall it the next time you perform an online update to get patches.

I think that Red Hat and Debian are also clean.

I don't know about other distributions. As I say, you can just not use these things. PCLinuxOS has a lot of good features that make system configuration easier. On the other hand if you wanted to choose a distribution to use in a business environment, such as to roll out to all of the employees in a business, then I would look at the 'clean' distributions that I listed above.

Thank you. With that said though. I am looking for a system that will work easily with my wired network. Will I have trouble if I use a system without these codecs, ect. like openSUSE? Becuase I want to run Linux but I certainly DON'T want to use any codecs illegally.

All of the distributions make wired networking easy.

PCLinuxOS is the easiest wireless network setup distribution that I have ever seen. The others are very difficult by comparison.

You could uninstall the libdvdcss and other files used to view DVD movies. Or you could just not put a DVD movie into the machine. It's easy to just ignore the fact that your computer could play a DVD movie.

Oh ok. Thanks. So really they are only for dvds?

I don't really know. I'm old and the whole multimedia thing never really interested me.