[packman] I give up, how do you use additional suse rpms

[leadfoot at lizard.com]

I still haven't been able to get either amarok or xmms to work.  I know
xmms is old, but it works great and has a much better interface to the
codec support routines it uses.

Amarok hangs if I try to play an AAC encoded stream.  No errors, no
diags or anything else useful, it just locks up - f***ing useless.

I found newer 9.x rpms for amarok in one section of the guru site,
but they're not in the on-line yast repo on the gwdg mirror site.
I tried downloading by hand, but they fail to load due to requiring
other packages.

Gxine and kaffiene will sometimes play an AAC encoded stream, but are
VERY unreliable.  They play a second of sound, then claim the audio
device is jammed, which is crap, because it works with mp3 files just
fine and has played AAC streams for hours when it does start OK.  I
just can't get it to start without using a roundabout trick.

The trick is to start amarok, play part of an mp3 file, stop but don't
exit amarok, and then start gxine.  Gxine will often work.  It keeps
selecting a useless goom visual display, which I don't want and it wont
save the 'none' selection between starts.

Kaffiene has the same problems.  And both gxine and kaffiene are video
players, so they disable the screen saver and power saving features,
because they *assume* you're using a video player to watch a movie and
don't want a screen saver.

No normal audio player works.  Why is this so damn hard?  Days wasted
fighting with this BS problem.  No useful diags or error messages are
available with any of these programs, except maybe xmms.

Note: xmms doesn't work right with RH based systems either, but for
a different reason.  The codec installs, but xmms seems to assume
that the stream is mp3 encoded and only attempts to use the mp3 codec.
I haven't figured out how to force it to try the AAC codec.  It might
play AAC files, but it wont play a network stream.


------- previous email --------

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 01:34:33PM +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:
> leadfoot at lizard.com wrote:
> > Hello,
> 
> Hi, sorry for the late reply.

No problem, thanks for replying.


> > to AAC, from MP3, and that I have only a couple of days left to figure
> > out how to play AAC files.  I figured it would be easy, add the guru and
> > packman rpm paths to YaST, and load a few extra packages.  Not so.
> 
> Hmm... AAC is MPEG4 and provided by the faad2 library.
> 
> Make sure to install the libxine1 package from Packman.
> I'm not sure whether it has been built with faad2 support or not though.

I think I have both faa* and libxine1 installed.

Here's every rpm I have installed on my 9.2 systems that include the
strings xmms, faa, xine or amarok in their names.  What did I miss?

xmms-lib-1.2.10-56
perl-Xmms-0.12-372.1
amarok-1.0.2.cvs20040907-12
xmms-gnome2-0-499.1
xmms-musepack-1.1.2-0.pm.1
xmms-plugins-1.2.9-68.1
python-xmms-2.02-83.1
xmms-jack-0.9-4.1
faad2-xmms-plugin-2.0-0.pm.8
amarok-xmms-1.0.2.cvs20040907-12
xmms-1.2.10-56.1
xinetd-2.3.13-42.2
xmms-kde-3.1-50.1
xine-extra-0.99.rc6a-4.1
kdemultimedia3-video-xine-3.3.0-13.1
flac-xmms-1.1.0-391.1
xosd-xmms-2.2.10-2.1
faac-1.24-0.pm.3
faad2-2.0-0.pm.8
libxine1-1.1.2-0.pm.0


> Then just use amarok.
> I'd recommend to install the latest (1.4.1) "amarok" and "amarok-xine"
> packages from the Guru repository.

I use amarok all the time, but it doesn't provide as much control or
visibility in to what formats it supports.  Xmms may be old, but it
works and provides a way to check/change the plug-in configurations.


> > I can't find anything stating that packman and guru packages work OK
> > together.  Can I mix them or not?
> 
> Actually I'm the maintainer of the Guru repository.
> We work very, very closely together. All our packages should work
> together just fine. In case you notice a problem, please let us know
> and we'll fix it.
> So, yes, our packages work OK together.

Great news.  That should be stated on your pages so people are aware
that you've taken the trouble to make that possible.


> > YaST often hangs during the rpm file downloads.  It never seems to restart
> > a hung file download, it will sit there doing nothing for hours, a huge
> > waste of time.
> 
> YaST2 has a number of severe issues on SUSE Linux 10.1 wrt package
> management/
> It's a known problem and has already been mostly addressed by updates
> (available through the online update service).

I'm still using 9.2 and 9.3, as my first pass with 10.1 wasn't positive.


> As a workaround, I'd suggest installing smart instead.
> You'll find instructions on my blog:
> http://dev-loki.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-to-install-and-use-smart-on-suse.html

OK, I'll look in to smart.


> Listen, I don't care. We're not SUSE Linux developers.
> If you have things to complain about, fine, but please report them on
> opensuse at opensuse.org and get help over there.
> It's not the purpose here, we don't do SUSE Linux help/support, we
> "just" build a lot of packages to be used on SUSE Linux.
> 
> > I finally get faad2-xmms-plugin-2.0-0.pm.8 installed on a 9.2 systems,
> > without YaST errors, but it doesn't work.  Starting xmms on the command
> > line (SUSE 9.2) produces this error:
> > "/usr/lib/xmms/Input/libmp4.so: undefined symbol: MP4GetTrackAudioType"
> 
> Have you also installed the latest faad2 package from Packman ?

faad2-xmms-plugin-2.0-0.pm.8 and faad2-2.0-0.pm.8 are installed.