Jason Reynolds wrote: >I have had linux running on my laptop for a few months now. I have has Suse >9.1 Professional, Mandrake 10.0 and now Gentoo. It seems that I always get >myself into situations where I need to use a windows box to do something. An >example is playing movie files that just don't seem to play, or visiting >websites with a funny commercial on them. It always seems to be an effort. >There are a few other people I know that are running Linux, and everyone had >some minor problem playing a file. > >Am I the only one that has this problem? I really, really want to kiss Windows >goodbye as much as I can, but it's hard when I keep having to use it as a >crutch. It's also difficult to defent the "I don't use linux, because I don't >want to use a hobby os" when I'm doing all this work to get things that just >work in windows to function. > >Any tips or tricks or websites I may be missing. I just want Gentoo and KDE to >do everything my heart desires. I really love using Linux and don't want to >have to give it up again so I can be really productive again. > >Jason Reynolds > Two years ago I had to install ogle, gxine, xine-ui, and mplayer to get video files to play. Out of those three one of them always worked. That was back with RH 7.3 I think. I'm on gentoo know and have been on it for over a year now. I use xine for watching dvds and for most of my video watching, and use mplayer for wmv which it plays perfect. I really like that it is able to play wmvs and most movs. A year ago I was studying biology and "needed" quicktime for 3d viewing and playing short movies on the net. For this I bought crossover and had as much problems with it working with embedded movie files as I did with gxine automatically recognizing and running the files externally. It has become a bit better, but still has its problems with embedded movs. Like I can't watch a lot of the movie trailers on quicktime.com. Flash was a hassle to install and uninstall when macromedia didn't offer a linux install. When they released their linux version it has pretty much always worked. And installing shockwave with crossover works real well. Otherwise you can get gplflash. With msoffice, I have to convert to .doc before I can print at the college which means I need to refine the formatting or wait about 10 minutes to download a ~60MiB file and install it on the campus computers. Even with all this I still need windows for one application I use. For this I use vmware which works really well with my AMD 1800+ and 512 MiB RAM. I only run vmware when I need it and the app is real small. I don't worry about defenting "I don't use linux, because I don't want to use a hobby os" because I do run a hobby OS. I compile all my own software as do you. I anticipate it not working. The theory of linux is we all give a bit of our time. Otherwise we are just leeching. I do recognize how you are perturbed about obvious things not working, hovever they aren't always as obvious as you think. Try emerge-webrsync emerge -p xine-ui emerge -p gxine emerge -p mplayer emerge -p mozilla-firefox emerge -p openoffice-bin emerge -p gplflash Use http://gentoo-portage.com and click "Browse portage" on the left side there. Other than that, search the forums at http://forums.gentoo.org/ and get involved by subscribing to a gentoo mailing list at http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml Fire a quick question when you have a problem and there's usually a quick resolution. Adam Shrode _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list