June 23, 2007 1:11 PM
Rhythmbox and Xmms
I have some problem where xmms just chases its tail through its play list when run as user, but works admirably when run under root, which isn't ideal. So I've been looking for another music player and I've tried out Rhythmbox, which at first didn't work because I didn't have the right codecs for it. It turns out that you also need these 'gstreamer-plugins-ugly' and also 'gstreamer-plugins-bad' from the rpmforge repo [and their dependencies obtainable using yum] and then just let her rip. It does need some minor tweaks to its preferences to get it to index your music collection the way that you want, but then it just works fine. And if it does crash for whatever reason a 'Bug-collector' window appears asking you to submit details of what happened and what you were doing at the time. Whether you submit your crash report is entirely your own decision, as you can just close it and no further action is taken.
After some further fiddling I've solved the xmms problem by renaming its folder [.xmms] in the home folder to .xxmms and then restarting xmms. This forces it to recreate its preferences and resets it all, and gets rid of its irritating behaviour of tail chasing :). Once its working properly you can delete .xxmms as its of no further use.
After some further fiddling I've solved the xmms problem by renaming its folder [.xmms] in the home folder to .xxmms and then restarting xmms. This forces it to recreate its preferences and resets it all, and gets rid of its irritating behaviour of tail chasing :). Once its working properly you can delete .xxmms as its of no further use.
June 09, 2007 2:22 PM
OpenOffice.org 2.2 woes.
Ever since I upgraded to Centos 5 I've been having problems with the Openoffice.org 2.2 I'd installed from binaries. Every time that I went to open a file in it it opened a 'Filter Selection' box and refused to open my file, which could be opened perfectly easily using OOo1.5 from Centos. That way I knew that the problem lay with OOo2.2 rather than the files themselves. So I went on #openoffice.org on freenode and asked there, and two people attempted to help me sort it all out. Eventually it was concluded that I'd found some rare bug which didn't easily manifest itself as no-one else had reported this problem.
So I asked on #gllug [Greater London Linux Users Group] and clive-h gave me a lot of help and advice, most of which didn't work until Clive-h suggested 'rpm -ivh --force --nodeps openoffice.org*.rpm' which I was reluctant to do as I've never forced an install before, but nothing else had worked. So I did it and it worked, OOo2.2 was now opening files that it couldn't or wouldn't open before. All kudos to Clive-h! The only thing that I can think of about the previous incarnation of OOo2.2 was that it was an incomplete installation, and thats why the force had worked.
So I asked on #gllug [Greater London Linux Users Group] and clive-h gave me a lot of help and advice, most of which didn't work until Clive-h suggested 'rpm -ivh --force --nodeps openoffice.org*.rpm' which I was reluctant to do as I've never forced an install before, but nothing else had worked. So I did it and it worked, OOo2.2 was now opening files that it couldn't or wouldn't open before. All kudos to Clive-h! The only thing that I can think of about the previous incarnation of OOo2.2 was that it was an incomplete installation, and thats why the force had worked.
June 03, 2007 1:27 PM
CentOS 5.
On my shiny new CentOS 5 I do have one slight problem ... when I log on and startx has run I get this error message "cannot open theme file /usr/share/apps/kdm/themes/RHEL". I then have to click the OK button with my mouse before I get a login box for my user name and password. So I checked and there is no RHEL folder and only a circles and a Bluecurve folder. So I went onto the #centos channel on IRC [Internet relay chat] and asked about it.
it turns out that I needed to alter usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc, and the line that has to be changed is Theme=/usr/share/apps/kdm/themes/RHEL and I changed it to 'circles' and then rebooted. And I was able to log out properly which was another of my problems. When the login screen reappeared after my reboot there was a big flower and two boxes requesting my login details, it was working! Once in I went back to the above mentioned file and changed the theme to 'Bluecurve' and logged out, to be met with two login boxes in a more official looking blue background, which is what I prefer. Another problem solved :)
it turns out that I needed to alter usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc, and the line that has to be changed is Theme=/usr/share/apps/kdm/themes/RHEL and I changed it to 'circles' and then rebooted. And I was able to log out properly which was another of my problems. When the login screen reappeared after my reboot there was a big flower and two boxes requesting my login details, it was working! Once in I went back to the above mentioned file and changed the theme to 'Bluecurve' and logged out, to be met with two login boxes in a more official looking blue background, which is what I prefer. Another problem solved :)