Hello, this is my first serious post to LQs.org dispite having joined some time ago. I've Finally got round to retiring my old laptop which was serving as an XP based music player in the garage while I was working on the cars. Now I have the spare system I've been trying to give it new life with a stripped down OS with the intent of using it to play DVDs.

I first tried cutting down the version of XP on it, however that failed, I then tried using ubuntu 10.04 but that was too slow and didn't recognise the peripherals. Then thought I'd give android a go as I had a disk of it literally lying round, but that wouldn't recognise the screen. Finally I've got fluxbuntu installed and it's really nice, now I just need some help trying to get it to do what I need it to.

I'm going to have a go now at installing the MP3 and DVD decryption, wish me luck cause I'm a fat lazy windows user and not used to all this typing.

Any other tips, hints or advice will be gratefully received.

Finally the Laptop specs are as follows (please don't laugh)
dynabook satallite 2550S
Intel Mobile Celeron 366MHz processor
256MB SD ram
20GB ATA hard disk

Yes I know I'm probably being overambitious trying to get this to play a DVD but if it doesn't work it gets down graded to MP3 player.

Thanks in advance


Edit: Just got an error message "coudn't find package gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

Ok, i'm really struggling with this, can somone please tell me if it's my n00bness or if it's fluxbuntu, but even with half an hour of googling i cant figure out how to transfer a single MP3 from my windows PC to my fluxbuntu laptop just to see if the speakers are working, I've tried a CD and a USB stick, the CD says "mount Failed" and I cant even figure out how to mount the USB =/

RestrictedFormats - Community Ubuntu Documentation - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

VLC and mplayer will play pretty much anything.

Your specs aren't any worse than the OLPC XO my son has, it runs Debian stable with the Enlightenment desktop.
It has a 400mhz cpu, 500mhz when overclocked; and 256mb ram.

cheers, that's encouraging for a start, and I'm just starting to get somewhere, I've just got my first MP3 to play under a Linux based environment, I'm so happy I could cry. I've found xmms installed already but now i need to find out how to install mplayer if xmms cant do DVDs.

The next step is to figure out how to mount the USB pen drive :P

Update: The DVD player is now installed i have VLC and have been trying to open a DVD

I've tried installing the decription things that i've found on google but each one throws up an error (note i've run all as root)

# cd /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples
# sh install-css.sh
gave me the error: "resolving www.dtek.chalmers.se... failed: temporary failure in name resolution"

# sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
Gave me the error: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg could not be found

when i go into the player i choose open disk, then the open disk box comes up in the disk tab and i click OK, the player registers the title of the DVD then goes blank like it had only jsut opened. your thoughts please?

I've been trying to download and install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package, got it downlaoded and installed it then did the apt-get thing to rn it but it gave me a list of things that coudnt be activated, i'm sorry i dont remember the exact word used i'm tired and my head hurts.

but anyway, i noticed on the ubuntu website that there are different versions of the URE package for xubuntu, does that mean i would need to install a URE pacage that was specifically designed for fluxbuntu?

this is the only thing i can think of causing these problems and if it's true i'm going to have to get rid of fluxbuntu and try something else, which is a shame cause i was jsut starting ti like it.

Linux mint is based on Ubuntu, but installs the multimedia codecs by default. I believe they have a flux based flavor as well. It might make your life easier, but I can't say for sure. Also browserlinux is a verylight distro based on Puppy, which is intended for older hardware. It has basically a media player and a browser, it will probably be the fastest and it MIGHT be able to do DVD's OTB.

Ideal, well that's another set of possibilities to investigate, sooner or later I'll find a good one.

I've fixed it!!! yes I've persevered and now I can play DVDs on my 350MHz laptop running fluxbuntu...

and I don't know how I did it because I was drunk O___O


If all my problems can be solved by mixing Murphy's with cider I'll be an alcoholic by the end of the week.

It's just like when I go on holiday, I get drunk and I think I can speak the local language, turns out, this extends to computer languages too. I have a lader-logic programming cause tomorrow, I hope I can find a pub with Murphy's on tap.