Kupek, Andrew & Sine thanks for your help with Linux

[the Gray]

Jebus, I feel like a kid again. Scratch that. Kids learn fast, and I'm getting my ass kicked by this thing.

Anyway, I have some good links to get some help from now.

Also, not that your help wasn't good Sine & Kupek, but Andrew seems to understand a 'New' user a bit better. If you ever have to give any advice to a complete dolt, take a note from him. I came back to stuff that you two wrote after following some of Andrew's tips, then what you wrote made a lot more sense.

I'm going to go scour some Google groups to find out wtf is going on. Codecs? Bad Install? We'll see.

[Kupek]

Andrew has used the distribution you're using; I haven't. Every Linux install I've done has required some amount of hacking to get it work properly. That is, going through the GUI stuff to get stuff done just didn't work right. Which is why I don't use Linux at home. I want shit to just <i>work</i>.

If you're looking to <i>learn</i>, then getting familiar with Linux is a great way to do so. But if you're looking for an actual alternative desktop OS, don't bother. As far my needs are concerned, Linux is for code development and nothing else.

[SineSwiper]

There aren't any such thing as codecs on Linux. It's all pretty much library files. I remember that it was a total bitch for me to install MPlayer, because I ended up doing it the hard way, via source code, and MPlayer required about 15 different other libraries to be installed, which I also did by source. It took me close to 12 hours.

(Not typical for a standard package, but MPlayer requires a lot of extra support for different libraries, like libquicktime, libmpeg, etc., and it was hard to get all of that to co-operate with each other. It was on the order of difficulty of trying to compile X by hand. Most other source code packages are really easy to install. Hell, I even just grabbed the latest version of PHP and it took 5 minutes by source code, using the famous three commands.)

And after all that, I found a package for MPlayer (I think it was in the universe repository) that would have taken 3 minutes to install. Again, trying to find a package is much easier. You might want to make sure that you have all of the libraries that you think you'll need. I was reading on GG, and somebody suggested installing libdvdcss.

[the Gray]

I saw that Sine, and I'm trying to find it!

I think I remember one line saying something about me already having it, but I can't find it.

This whole MPlayer thing... what a bitch. I think I'll just flip back to damn XP to play movies for now. I have been looking for the libraries for MPlayer, and you are right about there being a lot of them.

I wonder if part of the problem I'm having is that I'm using the amd 64 version of Ubuntu? I did find a 64 version of MPlayer, and that's the one that's hanging now when I try it.

This is all kind of fun, in a geeky frustrating way.

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

MPlayer is a bitch; stick with Totem. With the proper libraries installed it can play DVDs without issue.

Follow these instructions:

http://ubuntuguide.org/#extrarepositories

Then these:

http://ubuntuguide.org/#dvdplayback

Report back if you have any trouble.

Which is why I don't use Linux at home. I want shit to just work.

Haha, true that, and same. But if I didn't have the Mac I would still be using Linux - I've found neither Windows nor Linux to just work, but when Linux doesn't just work I can have a stab at getting it working. I can usually only shake my fists futilely at Windows.

[SineSwiper]

Minus the MPlayer issue, I've been really surprised how well I could get thinks working with semi-complex issues such as getting a network printer to work. This was no problem at all.

[Kupek]

Haha, true that, and same. But if I didn't have the Mac I would still be using Linux - I've found neither Windows nor Linux to just work, but when Linux doesn't just work I can have a stab at getting it working. I can usually only shake my fists futilely at Windows.

Both KDE and Gnome have piss-poor consistency - not to mention they often don't play well together. (On our current image at the office, KDE doesn't respect Gnome's default settings for Gtk applications. Drives me <i>insane</i>.) When I manipulate things in Windows, I <i>know</i> how it will respond now and in the future. I'm never quite sure with Linux desktop environments.

Although what made me abandon Linux on my laptop was not being able to get my wireless card working. That was the last straw. Maybe I could have gotten it working with another ten hours of effort, but at that point, I just stopped caring.

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

Fair enough, dude. I have the same consistency problem with Windows that you do with Linux. I don't encounter serious consistency problems in Linux because I use Gnome pretty much exclusively, and within itself Gnome is actually pretty consistent. It helps that the distro that I favour now - Ubuntu - is built on top of Gnome and is usability-centred (wireless connection worked out of the box, woo! :).

[Kupek]

I might give Ubuntu a whirl one day just to see what it's like. I thought that Suse would be the future, but it has dissapointed me of late. Aside from what I already mentioned, for Suse Pro 9.3, they included a beta version of OpenOffice. Not only that, they removed all indication that it is in fact a beta; they use their own splash screen that just says "OpenOffice 2.0" which does not yet exist. And, of course, it's very buggy, as beta applications tend to be.

[SineSwiper]

SuSE doesn't have apt-get, therefore it sucks. Enough said.

[Kupek]

Suse uses something called YaST which tries to be a combination of the Windows Control Panel and a souped-up Add/Remove programs. It's basically their version of apt-get. I never liked it. I've never used apt-get, but it's probably better than YaST.

Regardless, Suse seems to have taken the market that Red Hat left behind.

[SineSwiper]

I have SuSE loaded unto some work servers. Our guy over here loves SuSE, but YaST is okay, and it seems like there's a lot of stuff put in the wrong places here and there.

[the Gray]

graham@pcofdoom:~$ sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Package libdvdcss2 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package libdvdcss2 has no installation candidate

I couldn't do the first bit, it wouldn't do it for some reason. is the AMD 64 version that different for Ubuntu? I can't imagine it would be.

This is what I get when I try to ; sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 5.04 _Hoary Hedgehog_ - Release amd64 (20050407)]/ hoary main restricted
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hoary main restricted universe multiverse

[SineSwiper]

Comment out the CD-ROM entry. It might be trying to install from a non-existant CD.

[the Gray]

okay, how do I decomment this:

deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 5.04 _Hoary Hedgehog_ - Release amd64 (20050407)]/ hoary main restricted
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hoary main restricted universe multiverse

I have no frickin clue what you mean. This comes up in a notepad like window, not the terminal.

[Kupek]

Probably like this:

Code: Select all

#deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 5.04 _Hoary Hedgehog_ - Release amd64 (20050407)]/ hoary main restricted
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hoary main restricted universe multiverse

Different scripts and configuration files use different characters to comment out lines, but most use <TT>#</TT>. What that means is, "Everything after this character on this line is a comment" where a comment is something to clarify what is written, not a command itself. "Comment out code" is a way of removing code from execution without actually removing it from the file.

But, there might be a way to do this through the GUI.

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

I'd be surprised if there weren't! I'll check it out when I get home from work.

[SineSwiper]

Heh heh, sorry, I forgot who I was talking to :)

[the Gray]

Heh, no problem.

I will have to try that out when I get home Kupek, thanks. If there is a way to do it via Synaptic (GUI) that would be great.

I get the feeling already that Ubuntu (Linux) has great potential, but the biggest hurdle is ease of use. Sure it's powerful, but Joe Blow (me) doesn't give a shit if I can't get something done.

[Manshoon]

Alright, count me into the fold too. I went and set up Ubuntu over the weekend. It's kind of sad really, I went to college to study computers and whatnot and I'm just now trying out Linux. Oh well, better late than never. So far, it seems to detect all of my hardware without trouble, but I'm having issues getting sound to work, particularly when playing any kind of Flash movie or MPlayer (I have to echo Sine's comments about how much a PITA that is to set up). Probably missing some audio libraries or something. Anyways, I've got a couple n00b questions:

1. How come you can't log in as root and have to use sudo to do anything? I kind of figured Linux people were power users, they'd rather have full control over everything.

2. Is backwards compatibilty not important? I've had a couple instances where I was told I'd need to downgrade to a gcc version or have MPlayer complain about not being able to find the GTK libraries even though I had 2.0 and ended up having to get 1.2 to get it to shut up.


EDIT: Ok, followed the instructions here and that seemed to take care of the sound issue. All that's left now is to get full-screen mode to actually display correctly and not just show a full window.

[Kupek]

1. How come you can't log in as root and have to use sudo to do anything? I kind of figured Linux people were power users, they'd rather have full control over everything.

You can log in as root, it's just not a good idea. If you log in as root, all of your programs get run as root, which is inherently insecure; any program can do anything. If you're a normal user, then if you do something stupid like try to forcefuly and recursively delete the entire root directory, it won't happen. Or if you run a program that tries to do something nasty to a necessary system service. You <i>do</i> have power over everything, you just have to use it explicitly.