Many have decried the removal of XMMS from the Ubuntu repositories – it has been absent since Gutsy – despite it being the preferred music player for a lot of people and remains the only media player that – to my knowledge – can handle 30-40k+ collections. Not only is it the only player capable of very large collections, it also handles such collections with very little resource use. It’s the canine’s testicles, mate!
The colonos blog has provided some detailed explanations for installing XMMS in Intrepid (see this entry for an overview) and now the time has come for installing XMMS in Jaunty Jackalope, also known as Ubuntu 9.04. Read the rest of this entry »
The problem concerning the X Multimedia System (XMMS) is really a test for the wider community. It seems to affect users of Debian, Ubuntu and openSuse directly, but essentially it concerns all GNU/Linux users and the rest of the Free Software community, because it is a test of our social organisation: when and why can tribes be excluded and left to their own devices on the prairies of cyberspace?
This is written from the perspective of an Ubuntu user, but as you will see users from the Debian and openSuse communities also protest against the discontinuation of the XMMS. There might be other communities that have the same problem, but the Fedora leaders continue to give their users XMMS.
If the Debian, Ubuntu and openSuse leaders won’t put it back in, it is a great loss for their respective communities in terms of their social organisation. No one was asked and after consistent complaints since Feisty in the Ubuntu world nothing has happened.
To provoke, excluding XMMS users in this manner is not unlike, by analogy, the forceful evictions that slums and shanty towns are subjected to: just get out of the way for progress?!?!
That’s no way to talk to people! And there are many of us.
In some foreign language there is an expression that goes, more or less, like this: “Don’t cross the river for water“, since often times you can find what you’re looking for, if you could only see the wood for all the tress, in a different manner of speaking, as it were. So what’s the point of all of this?