It looks like a version of RealPlayer is being licensed to several major netbook Linux distro companies along with support for a number of commercial codecs that are not usually shipped with Linux distributions.

RealPlayer hasn’t, in the past, had a very good reputation, largely for the tendency for tons of unrelated software to arrive along with RealPlayer. The company appears, though, to have ended these practices more recently, so this looks like a great step forward for Linux-based netbooks.

Of course there are already media players on almost all of these netbook distributions, but most of them do not have the codec playback capabilities that RealPlayer will have, due to licensing issues. Unfortunately, this often confuses people who are used to playback of any media “just working.” Now, though, those issues shouldn’t come up, at least in many cases. If only it were that simple on the desktop (without the $100 price tag, thanks).

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