OK. I've been battling with trying to get my DVD player to play DVDs in RH 7.2, and need some help.

1) yes, I'm a newbie, didn't see that coming, did you? I bought a used laptop (Thinkpad T20) on ebay, wiped WinBlows off it upon receipt, and installed Red Hat 7.2 without incident. Everything works, including the DVD drive, but only for CD-Roms, not playing actual DVDs.

2) I have tried to install 3/4 of the avail. players I can find (Ogle, MPlayer, and Xine) but after the last two hour battle with Xine RPMs, which ended in circular redundancies (after installing RPM after RPM for particular missing libraries, etc. I tended to get errors for missing libraries I *know* I already installed!) but to no avail. I got MPlayer more or less installed successfully but it doesn't work, the other two not even that far.

So, I need some help. Namely:

a) should I ditch RH 7.2 and upgrade to RH 9? Would that have more embedded libraries to help eliminate all the circular redundancies from the RPMs?

I saw a note on some other site for newbies that talked about really going for self-compiling in most cases for better success over using RPMs - but I don't see how that is any better, because even if you compile the code, it STILL needs those external libraries if not in your install, and you'd be back to installing/compiling all those anyway....?

c) all the DVD HOWTO sites I see out there are from at least 2-3 years ago, I can't believe they are mostly correct anymore, I'm sure there have been several new versions of RedHat and all the other Linuxes since then.....

d) finally, did InterVideo's 'LinDVD' commercial product ever come out? I only see PR from 2000, nothing since. It appeared they were doing embedded Linux players for consumer electronics makers, but also were going to put out an inexpensive Linux player directly for PC users....

any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

amigaboy

To get your DVD working in redhat 7.2 make sure you have SCSI emulation... does RedHat 7.2 use LILO or GRUB ... (substitute your dvd hard drive letter for x):

in grub, add this to the kernel line:
hdX=ide-scsi

in LILO, add this to the image you boot from:
append="hdX=ide-scsi"

(if you already have an append line in lilo config, just add a space and put the hdX=ide-scsi inside the quote at the end ... like this:

append="xxxxxxx hdX=ide-scsi"


You should have 192-256MB RAM to do RedHat 9.0 .... the Thinkpad comes with 128MB and can be updated to 512MB...there are 2 banks that can hold a 32,64,128,256mb SoDimm ... part number for 128mb is 20L0265. (If you already have (1) 128mb, adding 1 more will get you to 256 ... perfect for GUI).
Kingston has new memory, or looks like you can get 128mb memory for about $20 per stick on ebay .

To prevent dependency hell ... use apt-get ... pick the 7.2 version and install it per the instructions...

to get totally updated for new versions and security, do:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

then to install xmms, do :

apt-get update
apt-get install xmms

it will solve all the dependancies and install all the files needed.

thanks for the help - on the first post, the machine uses GRUB, so I'll add those changes to the loader and test. I was going to increase the RAM anyway, so i'll look into that, too.

on the second post, i did in fact try using APT, but *it* required stuff I thought I had already installed, so I ended up in dependency hell trying to install *it*, too! which was more than annoying, to be sure. I'll check the sites you posted, however, maybe I wasn't looking in the right place.

Do you think it's easier in RH 9 vs. 7.2, however? Also, which package works for you (do you use a DVD player in linux on your system(s)?

thanks!

amigaboy

I think RedHat 9.0 is much improved over RedHat 7.2 (I use the RH9 2.4.20-20.9 kernel). I would use RedHat 9 if it were my laptop.

A 600-750 mhz PIII processor with 256mb RAM is good enough for RedHat 9 (including the GUI). 128mb would probably not be enough (The GUI and video would probably lag) ... I use a PIII 800mhz processor on my test workstation ... it is fine.

I use mplayer to play DVDs and SVCD/VCDs, which I installed from apt-get.

I use the apt-get from apt.freshrpms.net to keep my RedHat 9 updated.

I also have a RH 9.0, Dual p4 Xeon (2.6ghz), 2Gb Ram, server that I use for a MythTV server. That machine also uses mplayer and apt-get.