I’m doing some research for a friend who wants to dual boot Windows 7 with a Linux Distro that has Perl inbuilt & also supports .MP3 and other popular codecs “out of the box”
From my limited research, OpenSUSE seems to fit the bill (as does Mandriva Powerpack).
Also, how easy is it to create a dual-boot with Windows 7 with this distro?
Thanks in advance.
Hi,
It’s as easy as Mandriva. 
There is no problem in dual-booting openSUSE with win7 and the openSUSE installer will be fairly easy with this task. Just follow the suggested partitioning and you’re up to go.
Fisrt of all : make some room on the hdd for openSUSE and don’t forget to save all your critical data first and formost.
From my limited research, OpenSUSE seems to fit the bill (as does Mandriva Powerpack).
No, openSUSE does not support restricted formats such as .mp3 out of the box. However, it is easy to be enabled.
Do you mean via VLC?
Installing VLC will enable you to play such files via VLC only. There’s a handful of multimedia codecs which will give you full support for pretty much any format in any player. For more info, go →here.
Yep, it is really easy to install them. It’s almost out of the box.
The Powerpack has all the restricted codecs, but you have to pay for it.