Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Installed SuSE 10.1

I need a GLIBC_2.4 distribution, and SuSE's the only one tolerated here. Had a Debian Sarge DVD but no DVD drives :(

And was reminded why I moved away from RPM-based distributions.

TASK: Install Mplayer.

Solution: Look for MPlayer RPMs for SuSE 10.1 on the i686 architecture. Use services like rpmfind.net and
and realise that RPMs for your distribution have not yet been indexed there. Ho-okay, Google's always there. Find references to a website. Go crawling around the net trying to verify credentials of that site.

Then download RPM! And install!

Installation failed. Missing dependencies. Make "intelligent" guesses as to what RPMs will contain the files that MPlayer depends on. Download each dependency RPM individually, and hope you're right about them providing the file you're looking for.

Try installation. See it fail again due to dependencies by the new RPMs you downloaded. Go back to site and download again.

Install again. Whoops! Forgot to download one RPM. Go back, download and try again.

Failed again. Turns out one of the dependencies provides library.so.54, but the MPlayer RPM requires library.so.48.

Sigh.

Okay. Now I'm mad. Force install of MPlayer. Run it, and it fails, of course.

Go to /usr/lib, and copy library.so.54 to library.so.48. Feel totally unclean.

MPlayer works! Though I doubt H.264 encoded files will play.

It would have been so much more easier to compile from source.

I'm so glad Debian releases next month.

3 comments:

Savio Monteiro said...

hey cinelerra works over H.264!
i guess vlcplayer also works!

ok about SuSE .... hehe it's gonna be Microsoft SUSE ...!

Savio Monteiro said...

hey fedora now has synaptic and also installs dependencies just like debian-based distros!
wanted to try that..!

also that beryl 3d-window-mgr is native with fedora-6!

rohan_nog said...

LOL! Yet it's surprising how many people stll stick with Fedora and SuSE, instead of making their lives easier and moving to Debian or Ubuntu. Or better still, use Gentoo. It can't that take much longer to compile than dig through the web for rpms, or can it?