I recently switched to linux (mandrake 9.2) as I was tired of my computer freezing up every 2 minutes. Consequently I am rather unexperienced with program installations, etc. After 3 long hours I finally managed to get MPlayer for linux to install and I can play some movies through the bash shell, however, I would like to be able to open movies using GUI instead of a shell. I followed the instructions in the MPlayer readme aand procedded to unzip and place the skin's files into /usr/local/share/mplayer/Skin/. After doing this you are supposed to be able to typ gmplayer at the shell to open MPlayer with a GUI, however, when i do this I get a message saying it is an ivalid command. Obviously i went wrong somewhere and i would appreciate help from anyone who has been able to successfully use the skins. THX.

What's the exact message? Command not found? gmplayer should be a symlink to mplayer and a theme should be symlinked (or otherwise named) 'default' and it should go. Make the link if it doesn't exist. The gui to mplayer really isn't necessary, though.

i have no clue what you just said lol, can you give it to me in laymans terms, thx.

I mean if you don't get something like this
it won't work when you try to execute gmplayer. So you'd need to
ln -s mplayer gmplayer
(with the full path, or in the mplayer directory) and if you don't have an
.mplayer/Skin/default
then you need to make that too, I think, since gmplayer insists on having one. You can either rename a theme's directory or make another link.

Then it'll know it's supposed to execute with a GUI and have a bunch of pictures to dress up in.

Of course, other stuff could be wrong, but those are the likeliest suspects.