gnapse corner

I copied today some videos from a friend and they were in the RMVB video format. RMVB is a RealVideo related format of which is relatively hard to find a player to reproduce it, AFAIK.

Luckily MPlayer comes to our help. But wait a second, the normal MPlayer installation from the repositories does not include codecs for RMVB so if you already have MPlayer installed you probably would still be unable to play these files.

So I went to Google to find out any information about RMVB on linux and I found this post which pointed me to the download page for the extra binary codecs for mplayer, and listed other necessary instructions. Once I downloaded it and put it in the location specified in this post MPlayer was still unable to properly play my videos

So I suspected that maybe the /usr/lib/win32 folder might not be the expected location anymore, as the mentioned post is about a year old already and Ubuntu and MPlayer have changed. Then I realized, hey, all serious stuff should have a README file, so these codecs package should have a README file too. As I suspected, I typed in my terminal

$ less /usr/lib/win32/README

And this file explains quite clearly that the codecs should be located in the folder /usr/lib/codecs for mplayer to find them. It even mentions /usr/lib/win32 as the previous location which is no longer in use by mplayer, although some other players still use it.

So I decided to keep these codecs at both locations so instead of renaming the win32 folder to codecs, I made a soft link:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/win32 /usr/lib/codecs

And that's it! Now mplayer works just fine with RMVB.

UPDATE: If at this point there's some .rmvb still resisting, install the libstdc++5 package:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

Wouldn't the title be "Is there a similar application for Linux?"

No, you read it right. Being now more than a month using Ubuntu full time, I have been experiencing several open source applications. Some of them are new to me, some were already in my stock, but now they are even better, definitely ready for my desktop.

These are the highlights of what I've been using.

Tradition endures

• OpenOffice.org
  
• Gimp
  
• Gaim
  
• Eclipse IDE
  
• Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird
  
• Opera
  

All of these above are available for Windows too, and I have used them for a while now in both platforms. They are must-have applications for me.

The new kids on the block

I have found in the last weeks several applications that make my life easier, all of them just as handy as "sudo apt-get install".

• Beagle, Desktop search.
  
• F-Spot, Photo management.
  
• Banshee, Music player.
  
• Tomboy, Note-taking.
  

These are Mono-based. They prove how mature this project has become.

I also started using the dict utility, GnomeBaker instead of K3b, Firestarter as my firewall, nessus to keep my systems free of vulnerabilities, and Thoggen to rip my DVDs.

I remember myself months ago searching for applications in Linux to substitute my Windows applications of choice. Now is the other way around in many cases. I'd like a firewall for windows as configurable and easy-to-use as Firestarter, a photo manager as rich in features as F-Spot, and a desktop search system as clean and fast as Beagle.

For the first time since I've been using Linux (for about 8 years now) I feel 100% comfortable with a distribution, and that is Ubuntu Dapper Drake. I've used Mandrake and Red Hat initially, and SuSE, Debian and the previous Ubuntu in more recent times.

I am a spoiled power user

I have to say that I consider my self a power user, not afraid of the CLI but very thankful of aiding graphical interfaces for some tasks. I prefer Gnome-Baker or K3b over cdrecord, for instance. But I also prefer to get my hands dirty with Perl to automate boring repetitive tasks, and I even enjoy reading man pages. I am no newbie Windows-like user, but I could use some visual aid.

Therefore Windows gets too stupid-proof for me, without even actually being stupid-proof in the end. Linux, on the other hand, was always a powerful tool. It always allowed you to go under the hood to see what was going on, and was also slowly creating an environment for those not willing to go there so often. But there was always something wrong. And I am talking beyond hardware support.

Broken expectations

In SuSE 10, for instance, USB sticks were automatically detected, but the unmount feature when right-clicking it showed some error stating that only root was allowed to do that. And this was the best experience I have always had with flash memory sticks in Linux.

Ubuntu to the rescue

I never really dumped Linux for these minor annoyances, but I always found my self needing Windows every once in a while. And I was never really able to fully convince my point-and-click relatives and friends that they were going to feel comfortable with Linux.

Ubuntu Breezy was like the promised land but it fell short of being it. The RootSudo thing (rightfully praised as wonderful and intuitive) never worked for me, don't ask me why. But the rest of it seemed tasty and I expected the next release with anxiety.

And waiting gave the expected results

Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS answered many questions and covered nearly every expectation I had. Everything worked seamlessly and I can even recommend it without having to bring myself to ease the installation process, because installation is the easiest and seamlessly I've ever tasted ever, not only with Linux. Who said Windows was an easy install?

Ubuntu starts as a Live CD, so you can taste it before you embrace it. Once on the desktop and you'll love it. Gnome 2.14 comes out shining from end to end. The Human theme makes XP's Luna and KDE's Plastik look like amateur.

The initial and reduced set of applications pre-installed is very well chosen and covers a great spectrum of most common tasks. Gimp for graphics manipulation; OpenOffice.org as the office suite; gedit for simple text editing; Rythmbox, Serpentine and the Sound Juicer on the media side, Firefox for web browsing and Evolution as the mail client, are all excellent choices.

And a simple icon on the Live CD desktop triggers the installation process. You may need to make room for Ubuntu in your hard drive, and this might be the hardest part, but not that hard. Gparted is also available at this stage so you can comfortably resize some windows partition graphically without loosing your data (although backing up some data is not a bad idea though). I expect them to incorporate the partitioning stage of installation into the wizard for the next Ubuntu release.

Up and running!


Once installed, the RootSudo thing work and the available set of applications is enormous, provided you enable the proper software repositories. The documentation in this respect is wonderful, so an in-depth coverage of the details here is not necessary.

(Here you have another great source of information about Dapper Drake.)

I just have to say that Ubuntu 6.06 is amazing and you should give it a try. In the true Linux and Debian spirit, Ubuntu is freely available (both as in beer and as in speech), downloadable directly from the web or obtainable by ordering free installation CDs.