DJS Consulting Tech Blog |
foobar2000 is about the best, most organized audio player I’ve found. However, it is a Windows application, and according to what I’ve read, very reliant on Microsoft C++ extensions. I decided to give it a shot under wine, and it works great! There is a repaint problem - sometimes the playlist doesn’t refresh as it should. But, it’s pretty much a start-and-minimize sort of application, so that’s acceptable.
I downloaded xine and xine-ui again, just to get the freshest stuff. Compiled first time, worked first time. I must be learning how to do this stuff! I also did a “yum update” to get the most recent version of everything, and I upgraded ndiswrapper from .8 to .10.
I moved the computer into another room, and found that I was now getting conflicts on my wireless card. After some research, it appears that I’m picking up my next-door-neighbor’s wireless signal as well. I renamed our wireless network, and configured the cards to use only that network, and those conflicts went away.
Well, the last month has been interesting. I was able to get my Windows and Linux installations synchronized by creating a mount point for my second drive under /mnt/drive_d . Under that, I created a directory called /thunderbird for my e-mail, and moved my e-mail and newsgroup folders over there. (The first time, I missed the “newsrc” file, which is important - it tells what newsgroups you’ve subscribed to and which messages you’ve read.) Under Windows, I pointed it to “D:\thunderbird\pop3.knology.net”, and under Linux, it was configured to “/mnt/drive_d/thunderbird/pop3.knology.net”. I then moved the “wwwroot” directory from “C:\Inetpub” to drive D:, and pointed IIS to the new location. Under Linux, I did something a little different. As “root”, I deleted the directory /var/www/html, and instead created /var/www/html as a symbolic link to /mnt/drive_d/wwwroot (the actual command is “ln -s /mnt/drive_d/wwwroot /var/www/html”). That worked great as well.
MySQL was more complicated, but I was eventually able to get it working as well. I created the directory “D:\mysql\data” for the data, then configured /etc/my.cnf under Linux to look at “/mnt/drive_d/mysql/data”. I kept getting “Could not connect to server using socket /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock”. After some digging, it appeared to be a permissions problem. All the documentation said that the default socket was /tmp/mysql.sock, so I changed my.cnf to point there instead, restarted mysqld, and it worked! So, I have no idea what a Unix socket it, but I know that now I have one! 
I was also able to get DVDs playing using xine, compiling it myself, and using libdvdcss, I can even watch commercial DVDs. I’m really impressed with xine - it handles all kinds of media out of the box, including DivX and up to version 8 of WMV files. You can add codecs to it as well, to support almost anything you want to do from an audio or video perspective. Compiling the player took around 20 minutes, and compiling the front end took another 5. And, it was simple - download the .tar.gz file, do “tar xvfz [name].tar.gz”, “cd [name]“, “./configure”, “make install”. The “./configure” script is the key in the whole process - it looks at what you have installed, and creates make files that will work with your compiler.
Everything started going south, though, when I started having freezes. Eventually, I got to where I could not boot without a kernel panic, and then boot errors (which I detailed in this e-mail to the WBEL user’s list. Encouraged by my success over the past month, I decided to return to WBEL - it’s supposed to be more stable than FC2, and I bet that I can get ndiswrapper, the dual-booting web server, the common e-mail, and maybe even some other stuff working again.
Today was my first induction into the sterotypical Linux “dependency hell” (a term meaning that every package you try to install has dependencies on yet another package you don’t yet have). In my case, I decided to look into VLC from VideoLAN. The download provided contained about 85% of what was needed. I downloaded several packages from different places (two of note were Fresh RPMs and RPM Find), and got all unresolved dependencies down to 1 - “libxinerama.so.2″.
Upon further Googling, I found that this library is part of XFree86. This is where the “fun” began. XFree86 has gone not-free, so they don’t have anything for you to download. No worries yet - a new organization called x.org has taken over development of the free version, so I’ll go there and download it. Well, x.org is new, and they don’t have any software available for download either - just documents about what they’re going to do. Through my searching, I found that xinerama is an X add-on that supports multiple monitors. Although I only have one, this program just has to have it. After fruitlessly searching for hours, I gave up on VLC.
Okay, let’s try MPlayer - it sounds like it could be fun. Got it installed, and got nowhere - seems /dev/dvd doesn’t exist on my system. So, I create /dev/dvd/, unmount the DVD/CD-ROM drive, re-mount it under /dev/dvd/, and give it a shot. Now I get a message telling me there’s no installed handler. <sigh> Next I tried xine - the site recommended that I download the source and compile it myself. That was interesting - at this point, I got so frustrated that I called it a night.
Not that today was all negative - I was able to send an e-mail, using addresses imported from Netscape on my other machine, to every member of my Sunday School class. In fact, I was so impressed with how easy Ximian Evolution is that I changed the setting on the mail account to delete the e-mail once it’s pulled down. I haven’t yet found a way to import my mail from Netscape, but that’s a low priority. I also signed up for the WBEL Users mailing list, so I could keep up with what’s going on with WBEL.
Inspired by my previous day’s success, I fired up the computer and began looking at Ximian Evolution (now distributed by Novell) for my e-mail. I used Netscape 7.1 for my e-mail and newsgroup access, so I figured that Mozilla’s web and e-mail clients were similar. Evolution looked more like Outlook, so I decided to give it a shot. To begin with, I set it up to leave a copy of the e-mail on the server, in case things didn’t work. It worked very well - it’s got a nice interface. I also downloaded copies of all the pages on my web site, and modified the Sunday School prayer list using GEdit. I also did some other exploring around other features of the operating system and desktop environment.
I was also able to play an Ogg Vorbis audio clip using XMMS, a WinAmp clone included with WBEL. Tomorrow, I’ll be trying to send an e-mail to everyone in the Sunday School class, and get DVD video working.
