It was always my understanding that Xine enabled me to play movies, specifically unencrypted DVDs (or encrypted ones with the DeCSS plugin). So I'm guessing that Mandrake (or any distro) doesn't come with DeCSS installed but I was curious to see what happens anyway, so I started it up and inserted a disc. For starters no autoplay, but that's fair enough as Linux doesn't really seem to manage that yet and I felt I was being a little optimistic expecting that. However try as I might I just can't find the "play DVD" button. There's a play VCD button, A DVB button and one marked CD. Obviously I know what that VCD button is for (Video CD) and CD is for compact disc obviously, but not idea what DVB is for. Hovering over it with the mouse and the tooltip reveals it's for Digital TV input - neat! If only I had any of those on hand to test it with!
Xine is the epitome of a bad interface design. Not only does it have dark grey text/icons on a black/dark grey background (a visual nightmare), but lots of what look like working buttons but confusingly aren't. It's cluttered with tiny little meaningless icons that tell you next to nothing, even with mouseover tooltips. Just what the hell is an MRL browser for? What is an MRL and why would I need it to browse it? Clicking it brings up a file explorer type window, nowhere does it give even a hint at DVD playback. and after much trial and error I find that I can only play .vob files one at a time (or sequentially by creating a playlist) and even then I can't just type in the path to file, but have to clik up from my home to directory to the root and back down again to /mnt/cdrom! I thought the DVD element may be missing because I hadn't installed DeCSS and it hadn't enabled the right bit of Xine. So I rebooted into Windows (still no Internet access for me in Mandrake) popped over to a site that has the plugin, downloaded it, rebooted back into Mandrake and tried to install it. Oops! can't just download that plugin on it's own, I have to download the other 8 or so library files as well. So back I go to Windows and back onto the Internet where I decide to download everything on offer on that site. I'm sure that's overkill as there is probably just one of two packages I need, but I don't know which ones they might be, so I downloaded the lot (all 12mb of them) just in case I needed them it would saving me rebooting every five minutes. Back into Mandrake and finally get Decss and the dependencies installed. (note: this is now 2 things I've managed to install: mandrake is already allowing me to do more than any other distro thus far) Fine, now to retry Xine, but strangely it's the same. I load a random .vob file.... Nothing happens, no error, no playback, nothing. (previously when I'd tried this without the DeCss plugin it complained about not being able to play it). Tried another disc, same thing, Tried loading the main menu, great it works... only I can't navigate around with the navigator nor just click on the screen element as I do in any windows DVD players. So for all the fantastic skill of the coders it's still useless to me as far as I'm concerned, as I can't play DVDs, but due such having such a dreadful inept and annoying interface I almost feel that it's a blessing in disguise. (But I would like to point out that I think the work been done to reverse engineer DVD encryption, navigation and playback is truly stunning. I tip my hat to all concerned). At some point I'll download videoLan and try that, at least that had a simple interface and easily allowed the playback of DVD discs. (Well, it did in Windows anyway)
Installing from Source
After the resounding success of installing from RPM in Mandrake,
I thought I might be lucky installing from source (tar.gz file, as
opposed to a srpm in this case). I download gocr, to try my luck with
optical character recognition. Xsane works brilliantly for scanning
already so I hoped GOCR would be the perfect compliment. Downloaded it
from sourceforge unzipped/untarred it and followed the instructions, which were
(after untarring) "2. Change to gocr directory and run make.
cd gocr[version]; make install
That's it." if only that were true!
When I installed Mandrake (using all 3 discs this time unlike last
time) I didn't check the "development" tree in the applications. My
logic was thus: I am not going to be doing any programming in Linux
(would do if I could program c or c++) the most I'll be doing
programming wise will be html, php, sql any maybe a modicum of Python. I (wrongly)
assumed that the development tree would be for coders developing linux
applications and didn't make the assumption that it was in fact
"virtually compulsory" in order to install source code. But not to
worry, I just installed GCC (and libraries) it from the original
Mandrake discs and reran the installer. Sadly only to be met with
another error message.
I've never managed to install anything from source ever, regardless of distro. I've always encountered spuriously obscure errors like this. Not being a C coder I have no idea what they means, and therefore no way to know how easy is they are to fix or resolve: Is it my fault they won't install or is it a fault with source code or have I downloaded an incorrect version?
Program installation is one of the THE most annoying things in Linux. When it's not dependency hell from rpms, it's the necessity to download 15 different library files, or just getting an install error message that I can't understand. Sure, it might be much easier with Xandros/Lindows/Debian/Gentoo etc (if I could access the internet of course) but surely Linux is mature enough that some bright coder could build an installer framework for Linux, so regular people needn't have to compile source? There are dozens for Windows and I'm sure as many for Mac (Nullsoft, Vise, Installshield and Microsoft leap to mind for Windows) "ah!" I hear you all exclaim. "but haven't you come across that 'missing dll' hell in Windows often enough?" you ask?
err... well no actually, not really! I can think of no more than about two or three occasions when (back in 1998) I was running windows 98 and downloaded a VB based package that needed VB5 (or VB6) runtime files. Mostly when that happens now though, the author repackages the .exe with runtime files included or gives a link to download them from Microsoft - (certainly that's a bit of a pain, but simplicity itself to install by anyone: download file, double click .exe... click "next" a couple of time and that's it, done. Then run desired application!)
Neither of these issues is the specific fault of Mandrake or the GOCR developer(s) but they're not helped by them either. Perhaps I'm just not thinking like "a geek" enough to use Linux effectively and get it working properly. But I keep thinking that it shouldn't be this complicated. I've had to re-install MacOS a couple of times in the past, as well as build literally dozens of Windows machine from scratch and it's not this complicated (Windows certainly wasn't brilliant, all that rebooting you had to do with win9x was ludicrous - but at least it is much better now in 2000/XP) Perhaps it's just that every other operating system is geared towards "real" people whereas Linux isn't. Installing anything on Macs, Amigas, RiscOS, Beos and even Windows is simple. With Linux it's complex, slow, tedious and immensely frustrating, especially when it doesn't install (as it is in Windows when things don't/won't install) - but it's an exception in Windows, not the norm (In my experience anyway)
- "Linux Giving Grief, Part 1"
- "Linux Giving Grief, Part 2"
- "Linux Giving Grief, Part 3"
