LincolnBlogs

I know, I know. I wrote earlier about how the T23 was suffering some sort of display death again and would undoubtedly end up on freelinuxbox.org. While that is definitely true, I was looking at it today and thought I’d start it up again and let it do it’s updates. I did and the display was working the whole time, so I thought I would play with it a little more….:

I wanted to test getting some multimedia playback on this distribution. You see, RedHat based distributions are notorious for following the letter of the law and not letting you have access to any of those nasty codecs we all like to use. You know the ones I am talking about, mp3, wmv, dvd, etc.. Well, since I just happened to be traveling abroad in europe for a few minutes where this is completely legal, I decided to have a go at it.

A quick search brought me to this website and the directions looked pretty thorough so that’s where I started. The only thing I added to the process was adding vlc, my favorite media player, and everything else worked beautifully. To recap, follow these instructions, taken from the previously mentioned website and only edited to add vlc.

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/RPMS.dag/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -Uhv http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
yum -y install libdvdcss libdvdread libdvdplay libdvdnav lsdvd mplayerplug-in mplayer mplayer-gui compat-libstdc++-33 flash-plugin gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly vlc
wget www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/mplayer-codecs-20061022-1.i386.rpm ; rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs-20061022-1.i386.rpm
wget www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/mplayer-codecs-extra-20061022-1.i386.rpm; rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs-extra-20061022-1.i386.rpm

Now a couple notes….

Although I have not yet rebooted to check if that has any effect, the default media player, Totem, still does not play very much. While slightly dissapointed, I never really liked Totem anyhow and found that to be the case on almost every distribution. VLC, however, works exactly as expected, which is, perfectly.

I also took pains to install xmms, my favorite mp3 player on the T23 as well and, although it installed fine from the Dag repos, it doesn’t play a dang thing. VLC to the rescue again. In fact, I hadn’t realized that VLC actually makes such a good audio player!

It is important to also note that I still really feel that this CentOS desktop runs quite well – very snappy. I know I keep saying that, but it really is quite noticeable on this older laptop.