It's the second time I'm testing Moblin. The first time was with Alpha1, but now with Alpha2 I decided to install it. One main reason I kept Alpha2 was because of the availability of Xfce 4.6 ;-) Apart from that the experience is really great and it does boot fast. I turn the netbook on and after 1-2 seconds I already see an image on top of the Xorg session. It feels like hibernation but it's not :-)
The first day
I stumbled over the bug #1088 when I entered my key for the Wifi access. Of course I obviously had to type it wrong... One way to fix this was to clean up the configuration file of connman, within /var/lib/connman/. Otherwise nothing alarming.
After that I themed a little bit the desktop, like the awesome Nodoka-Midnight theme. Next I quickly figured the package manager, yum, and I headed toward a system upgrade. This step took a very long time, up to 3 hours. Alpha2 is as of today around 1 month old and there were over 300 packages to download. That took around 700 actions for yum like installing, updating and cleaning up.
Once the upgrade was done I installed the necessary devel packages to compile xfce4-gvfs-mount and xfce4-clipman-plugin both respectively from git and subversion. The Install/Remove Software GUI (gpk-application) is very nice, better than what I knew from Synaptic. Amongst the Moblin packages I found xfce-software-development which eases a little bit the selection of packages to install.
Well, one issue at the post upgrade was the default background disappearing, so I found out that it came from the package xfce4-desktop-branding-moblin. I'm kinda attached to that background now, I like the electronic-circuit like board, so I managed to copy/paste it. It's called moblin-energy-blue-1024x600.png.
The second day
A few issues:
- Firefox crashes "a lot".
- The gvfs-fuse-daemon is missing.
- Impossible to play MP3 or Divx.
I dunno how to fix Firefox and there are no appearing bug reports. I tried out the official binary provided by Mozilla and it crashes the same ways. GMail is crashing, Twitter is crashing when reloading the page after giving an up-to-date state, https on xfce.org, etc. So this is annoying. I will try to get a backtrace and install Midori since Moblin has a recent version of WebKit GTK+.
Now about the Gvfs topic, I was first fighting with an old build of xfce4-gvfs-mount on my home partition to finally notice that the gvfs mount was useless as gvfs-fuse-daemon was missing by default on the system. This means I can only access the files the hard way by using the gvfs programs to copy, list or delete files. I had to install the package gvfs-fuse.
And finally, the Moblin repository doesn't provide decoders for MP3 or Divx. Those are provided with the set of ugly plugins for GStreamer and is not available.
Hence I downloaded and installed the following packages from Fedora 10: a52dec, libmad, libmpeg2, lame-libs, libmpeg3 and of course gstreamer-plugins-ugly. The gstreamer-plugins-ugly package depends on a little more libraries but I didn't find them and I am already covered with the libs I downloaded.
Last but not least, I miss Wesnoth and the Xfce Power Manager :-)
Update: Screenshots
Update: Actually to get Totem to read Divx I needed to install gstreamer-ffmpeg! I have a dozen of rpms in a directory.
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how exactly do I add the packages to get the mp3 support working?
ReplyDeleteI downloaded each package and I used the command line tool "rpm", so I did not add a package repo to avoid mixed packages. I looked for the RPMs on Koji (official Fedora packages) and RPM Fusion:
ReplyDelete- http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
- http://rpmfusion.org/
After getting gstreamer-plugins-ugly I ran "rpm -i gstreamer-plugins-ugly-*.rpm" and it complained about missing deps. I took the libs mentionned in the blog (a52dec etc) from the repos, and ran "rpm -i --nodeps a52dec-*.rpm lame-libs-*.rpm ... gstreamer-plugins-ugly-*.rpm" and gstreamer had an mp3 capable decoder.
when i try and install the packages it gives me this:
ReplyDeletewarning: libmpeg2-0.5.1-3.fc10.i386.rpm: header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 49c8885a
warning: waiting for transaction lock on /var/lib/rpm/_db.000
what could the problem be?
Did you Google the error? A first hit suggests to run "rpm --rebuilddb" (maybe "yum clean all && yum makecache" may be wiser).
ReplyDeleteI got it working.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your help
thanks, i´ve been googling around and i think this is the best solution to get mp3 and divx support. As everything on linux, i know it will struggle against me, but i´ll try. I cannot wait for moblin´s final version.
ReplyDeleteGreetings from Argentina.
It would be great if you could make a tutorial for everyone that whants moblin to read divx, mp3, etc...
ReplyDeleteAn easy noob tutorial would be fantastic of you =)
I'm the first one requesting it ... if I may.
Thanks ;)
Hi @Pepo :) well, moblin is really a nice distro, it doesn't need any special geekness or tech skills.
ReplyDelete@Miguel, it's done, I wrote 3 articles related to this. There is no direct example for DivX, except a mention that you need FFmpeg for that but it should be pointers enough. Don't forget that you can also buy codecs at Fluendo.