h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have installed fedora core 3, at the moment its using gnome gui.


any suggestions for a good media player to play my music? mainly mp3s.

any other suggestions for programs that might be useful?

my aim is to set up my linux boot such that i don't have to use windows anymore windows becomes the option i rarely use.

I haven't tried it, but there's a GPL clone of RealPlayer on sourceforge.net...

I quite like VLC (VideoLan Client). It's specially for streaming audio files over a network, but it works well as a stand alone client player too. It comes with quite a few built-in codecs by default as well.

You can download the source from videolan.org, but it has various dependencies which I found quite messy. I've recently discovered freshrpms.net have a Fedora Core 3 yum repository which includes videolan. The package is called videolan-client so add freshrpms to /etc/yum.conf and type: yum install videolan-client

Then to run the program type vlc

Hope that helps

Jonny

I've just noticed I said audio files over a network - I meant to say media files - obviously with a name like VideoLan it's for Video and Audio

Jonny

xmms works fine for playing mp3s and has done for years
http://www.xmms.org/

Thanks for the advice, I will take a look at them, was thinking before i got up today, i could probably do with something similar to a tutorial on how to use linux me not really knowing anything about it.

the extent of my actually knolendge nad guess work is what the folder names stand for, out of these ones . bin - binaries for your programs, boot - where u stick all the type of stuff to do with turning on the computer, usr- something to do with the users of the system. sys - system. lib - libary. home - user home directorys

beyond that not a clue, and i really don't know much about linux, hence why i installed it, so i can learn.

I have found a tutorial type thing that showsthe newbie how to use the linux commmand line.

looks like its explains the basics of alot of other things as well

Help?

I have tried to install the videolan-client rpm from freshrpms. (i figured out a websearch how to install)

I get the following error about missing libaries.

error: Failed dependencies:
liba52.so.0 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libaa.so.1 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libdvbpsi.so.3 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libdvdread.so.3 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libfaad.so.0 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libfribidi.so.0 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libid3tag.so.0 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
liblirc_client.so.0 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libmad.so.0 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libmpeg2.so.0 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libwx_gtk-2.4.so.0 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libwx_gtk-2.4.so.0(WXGTK_2.4) is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386
libxosd.so.2 is needed by videolan-client-0.8.1-1.1.fc3.fr.i386


where do I get and how do i install these libaries?

OK, sorry, maybe I shouldn't have introduced you to VLC if you're not too sure how to use Linux.

The best way to solve dependency problems I've found is to use yum. This searches for RPMs from a yum repository, and decides which one you need to install.

You'll need to configure yum though, by editing yum.conf to make it look like this:
http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/rpms/yum/yum-fd.conf

You don't need to change the whole file though, just add the 4 lines that start with [freshrpms] at the bottom of the file.

Then type "yum install videolan*" at a root prompt (without the quotes).
yum will then list quite a few things it wants to install as well as videolan, if you just say yes, it will install all the dependencies without much trouble.

I hope that helps - it's quite a complicated subject, but hopefully that will be enough for it to work!

Jonny

Jonny!

I added the freshrmps yum data to a repo in the folder yum.conf tells you thats an option to use.

It worked fine when i ran it as superuser.


The next task if you could help me , is i have my hdd partioned like this

mainwindows(NTFS)|mainlinux(ext3)|linuxswap(NTFS)|extended containing my logical partions: |windowsprograms(NTFS)|schoolwork(FAT32)|games(FAT32)|music(FAT32)|spare(FAT32)


From linux i can't find the fat32 partitions, though the kernal has found hda0 - hda10, can't remember where ifoudn that but that tutorial thing i looked at told me about locations of things that let you know statistic stuff from the kernal.

so how do i acces the partions. I have the music partition so that i can listen to the same files in windows and linus without repeating the data. When i am using the external harddrive, it identifies all the partions on it and lets me access the only fat32 that is on it, the computer icon when i click on it shows me the NTFS ones on the external drive, but obivously does not let me access it.


suggestions?

OK, Well to access any drive in linux, first you have to mount it. At a guess when you plug the external HD in, Fedora notices you've plugged something in and automatically mounts it. But extra partitions need to be mounted manually. So for example, if you want to access the data on hda2 the device path for that is /dev/hda2. You can then use the mount command to mount the disk to a specific folder. So, as root, make a directory in the /media folder (this is where by default all FC3 disks go). So for example "mkdir /media/hda2".

You can now type "mount /dev/hda2 /media/hda2"

Now when you go into /media/hda2, all the files on that partition should be visible (as long as it's FAT32).

If you try that with all your disks, you should be able to work out which is which.

Also, once you've managed to mount all of them you can type "df -h" to see the size of the disks and the usage of them.

There are other ways of doing it, for example dmesg would output all the hardware connected to the computer, but that's quite complicated to explain, so this way is probably the best for now!

Jonny

I knew that I had to mount it, but didn't understand how.

heh, damn im good using an educated guess I got the number right for my music partion

Thanks for your help



To write to these drives I need to change the permissions, what would be better, leaving the owner as root and setting others to read write, or to change the owner to me.

I can't change the permissions on it :S

Trying to change the permisions of others to read write dosn't work, it only lets others permisisons be r-x or r-- not rwx or rw-

I want to mount them automatically, I have found from looking at virus websites that you have to add a line to fstab, however dispite having looked at a few i don't understand what all of the line means.

what would my best way of going about adding the drives to be mounted?

fstab is something I only started experimenting with last week, so I'm not too sure about how to use it myself. But I found a fairly good tutorial for it was http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

Basically a lot of it can be left to defaults, and can be borrowed from one of the previous lines. The first 2 columns are exactly like the mount command you've been using recently. The third column specifies the FS type (so it should always be vfat for FAT32). The fourth column is one I wasn't too sure about, and my answer to it is probably very insecure, but in order to allow all users on the system to it I set umask=000, and left everything else as default. umask sets permisions that aren't granted (ie, it's the other way round to chmod). The last two columns I've left as 0, because these are to do with backup and file checks, which I've never come across so I didn't really know what to do with them. (I've only been using Linux for about 18 months, and I've not experimented much with that sort of thing).

So my data partition has this entry in fstab:
/dev/hda5 /mnt/data vfat umask=000 0 0
(With tabs instead of spaces!)

I hope that explains it a bit more, let me know if you discover a better way of setting the permissions!

Jonny

Thanks for the link and explination

I now have partions mouting themselves as writeable

My next trick will be to figure out how do the whole not giving everyone permissions but just me. Though thats not major as at the moment I am the only user of this Machine

What is annoying is there dosn't seem to be anything anywhere on the net that just explains it simply do this for this lol. Thats life.

Ah the joys of Linux learning, it's when you use xargs, grep and du thats your really swinging.

*does a goolge on those commands*

only usefull for advanced things really.

commands I wish I was told about are, vi, find, man, apropos and kdm

Traveller in Time pressing 'top'
"Or 'ae' or 'mc' or . . . . "