I've searched the threads, but don't see any that address my problem. I'm a complete linux newbie, so forgive me ahead of time. I'm running suse9.1 personal, KDE 3.2 (I think) on a Celeron 300mhz machine, 392mb ram. I successfully installed mplayer and had it working, very well, in fact. I recently installed getbinnews and since have had the following problem. I don't know if the 2 are related or not. When I'm file browsing on my harddrive and try to open a media file (set to open with mplayer), regardless of type (mpg, wmv, avi, etc.), kde opens up a button on the task bar with the hourglass turning as if it were going to load, then the button disappears and the media file never opens. Mplayer will not load from the start menu either. I've tried rebooting, I've even tried opening KDE monitor to check running processes, and mplayer does not show up after i've attempted to open it. xine still works fine (on the file types it handles) and i can view mpgs with it, but mplayer works much better for me. I would like to figure out what's wrong with it. I have not tried uninstalling/reinstalling. Anyone have ideas for this linux noob? Please forgive the M$ lingo parallels, don't know what to call the same stuff in linux. (task bar, start menu, etc.) thanks

open a terminal and type to see error messages.

thanks for pointing me in the right direction. i think that fixed it. i found the error. the libgif.so.4 resource was missing, so i reinstalled that rpm. what confuses me though, is that i had already installed it once and mplayer had been working fine. i'm not sure what i did that would have changed that file/resource. had a similar incident with kuickshow at the same time, but i figured it out. hopefully it will just work now. if it becomes a frequent problem, i'll probably be back. thanks for the help.

ok, thanks to mrcheek i've figured out what was wrong. mplayer needed libgif.so.4 to work. i used yast2 in suse to install this package. it brings up some dialogue box about changing a reference to libungif.so.4 if memory serves, or vice versa. forgive me, i'm not sitting in front of my linux box. alternately, kuickshow stopped working after i reloaded the libgif package for mplayer to work. when i checked kuickshow, it said libungif not working. so, i reinstalled the libungif package using yast2 in suse. but then, mplayer does not work again. i'm sure there is a simple explanation/resolve for this issue, but again, i'm a complete linux noob. could anyone point me in the right direction on this one again? thanks

maybe you can installing in this order libungif, mplayer and then kuickshow to see what happens.