Intrepid Ibex – Ubuntu 8.10: Released, installed, configured and running XMMS
Colonos’ interface to cyberspace has been updated to Ubuntu 8.10 and here are the first impressions – with more to come.
So far most things look fine (the default wallpaper is surprisingly nice), lm-sensors configured painlessly, but getting my favourite music player, XMMS, to work proved a right hassle – basically you have to be Intrepid to get it compiled in the Ibex.
Existing how-tos for XMMS in Hardy are unsufficient – many more liberaries required, a pure dependency hell.
So more about that soon.
Another annoyance, I find, is Pidgin’s integration with Gnome, so that your log out button in the upper left hand corner (default position, see screenshot above) becomes your Pidgin status icon when Pidgin is running. First of all it is almost next to the Pidgin systray icon anyway and secondly it is annoying to have one kind of logout button (the standard) when you don’t have Pidgin running and another logout button (i.e. incl. the Pidgin options) when Pidgin is running. Perhaps I just don’t get it…Also, Nautilus somehow thinks that my external hard disk is a “Picture CD”, which means that it redefines its interface for the (wrong) purpose and that’s annoying as well (and that behaviour was confirmed in irc freenode #ubuntu with reference to an 8Gb USB memoery stick).
More about XMMS later, it is slowly time for bed, been a long night.
Last note, perhaps: here is a screenshot of Intrepid Ubuntu 8.10 with Compiz enabled, “visual effects” set to “normal” (the middle way), and more than 20 applications running (incl. OpenOffice, Firefox, gimp, K3b (hence KDE libs as well), Acroread, VLC (playing a video), XMMS (playing music), and Deluge (torrenting) on an Intel Celeron M 430 @ 1,73GHz with 1.1Gb RAM:
and after running for about 10-15 minutes with that ridiculous amount of applications at once (which I’d never do under normal circumstances) the system resource use looks like this:
Friday, October 31, 2008 at 02:07 (130)
Good nite :)
Friday, October 31, 2008 at 20:42 (904)
Hello, time is in short supply at the moment, if you need help to get XMMS up and playing, leave a comment, then perhaps I’ll get down to adding the Intrepid specific information needed to complement the existing how-tos – based on Gutsy and Hardy, the first two generations that the die-hard XMMS crowd have had to endure so far. This whole thing really makes you doubt the great promise of user power in an increasingly corporate led Free Software “community”.
In a sense it is just like the socalled democracy thing – the rich control everyting and the masses run along, while those with slightly different ideas or choices are………
Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 14:01 (625)
[…] I went to great length to compile XMMS in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex – which was a total nightmare finding all the needed libraries – and then I ended up with a […]
Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 23:56 (039)
[…] posted about it three times (1,2,3) when installing Intrepid and there have been close to two thousand hits by now, including […]
Monday, November 24, 2008 at 09:59 (457)
At the end of this post there is a fairly detailed outline of all you need to get XMMS up and running:
https://colonos.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/the-xmms-in-gnulinux-manifesto-v01/
pasted here:
Ubuntu specific information on how to best get XMMS up and running:
First go to KnutA’s site:
http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmms/
…where he kindly hosts an XMMS repository that allows you to add it to your apt-get system and it will pull the dependencies. Set up for Lenny, Hardy and Intrepid (which is just a copy of the Hardy repo, but it works). If you don’t know how to add a third-party software source (or repository) then look here.
That should be your first step. Install XMMS that way:
sudo apt-get install xmms (or search in Synaptic).
Then you have to add various encoding and decoding tools if you need them.
Pulseaudio, the new system: http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/xmms-pulse/
I do not use that. Choosing ALSA as output in XMMS works better for me. With Pulseaudio there were funny issues with other channels, losing sound for a half a second every now and then.
There is still an mp4 .deb here, which also works in Intrepid:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/i386/xmms-mp4/2.6-1
To get FLAC follow the second part of this how-to (you don’t need to compile XMMS as outlined in the first part of the how-to, since you can get the .deb with apt-get from KnutA):
http://blog.sartek.net/2008/04/install-xmms-on-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron.html
More relevant compile info here:
http://blog.xanda.org/?p=436
You might also want .wma (but much better is to convert your files), but if you need it, then you have to compile it (or google for an .rpm and use alien to convert it):
http://mcmcc.bat.ru/xmms-wma/
More relevant information here: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-21414.html
However, if you trust me you can also just download this file, Plugins.tar.gz and unzip to your:
/home/user/.xmms/Plugins folder (shut down XMMS, of course, for good measure):
That file contains the Flac and .wma plugins that should work in Intrepid and possibly Hardy, but why not go ahead and do it yourself, you might just learn something in the process?! :)
Maybe you also need Shorten (shn) for XMMS: http://www.etree.org/shnutils/xmms-shn/
– about which you can find useful information here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=833164&highlight=shn
Anything else that anyone’s uses or maintains?
If you have a virtual machine or an extra box to play around with it might be a good idea to compile your things somewhere else then your production system, but a similar environment, since it most likely will send you in dependency hell, chasing packages discerned from compiler output and with the aid of the higher spirits of telepathy. I just couldn’t be bothered to keep track of them. I know, I should have extracted it from the Apt logs and and and …
Anyway, in the end you have a system with a load of stuff that you don’t need and I ended up doing a fresh install, but I mostly do that when a new distro comes out, – first install it to check it out, stress it and try different things, before settling for a plan for the final, hopefully, install. NOTE: If you do it this way do remember to use checkinstall, which generates .debs that you can use the second time around. That is also how you should do it in a virtual or other machine, so that you can transfer it to your favourite stable machine where you just want to play music while you work on something else.