If you are experiencing problems getting real audio to play when you click a web link, this guide may help you or give you some ideas. I had successfully installed real player 8 and it was working fine until I used apt-get to update my Xandros system one day. Coincidence or not, real player streams would no longer work after this day (for whatever reason). Please be advised there are a 1000 things that can cause real player problems on Linux but these steps did solve my particular problem this one time. Good luck.

First, make sure RealPlayer is installed. This might seem obvious but often RealPlayer9 or RealPlayer One are installed, These may or may not work from web browsers depending on how they are installed. Also, real players are default on some installations (i.e. Xandros) but not on others (i.e. redhat, debian, fedora core 1, ...).

I know that realplayer8 does in fact work on RedHat 7.3 RedHat 8, RedHat 9, Fedora Core 1, Xandros and Debian only because I have tried these. I have not had much success with other version of Real Player.

If you need to install a real player, this guide may help you. (Full disclosure...I wrote the guide. Its worth what it cost you and no more.)

www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=211402

I knew for sure I had RealPlayer8 installed because I installed it, so I did not try to install this package. It turns out I needed the install package anyway, so you may want to download it and keep it in a backup, but more on why in a minute. First I tried to run it by hand. I opened a console and found the executable which is called

This can be done with the command

The shell returned

The /usr/bin/realplay file is commonly the path to the executable and this time was no exception. I went into the directory with

>> cd /usr/bin

and attempted to run the executable with

>> ./realplay

The shell responded with

I do not know a whole lot about Linux but I read the output carefully and guessed (correctly or not) that the 'realplay' program attempts to run(execute) another program called /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay. In other words, the 'program' I was trying to execute was either a link, shortcut, shell script or some other pointer to the real file at /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay. It was not the actual program that does the real work (no pun intended).

Next I went to the directory /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/ by doing a

The shell returned a comment that the directory did not exist either. At this point, it was obvious the installation was completely hosed. Being a Windows vet, I opted for a reinstall.

I still had the .deb package from my first (successful) install. I did a reinstall with

As a result the shell said:

then returned to a prompt. It was only at this point I figured out what had happened to me. Notice the line from the shell. Looks like an upgrade hosed me and replaced my working version. This happens sometimes. This is not to say the newer version doesnt work or even isnt better. Upgrading over a fresh install just breaks things sometimes.

At this point the realplay was successfully reinstalled but the browser still would not work. Having dealt with realplay alot (since I am a Jim Rome fanatic), I knew the browser plugin had to be messed up. This happens all the time with realplayer even if a fresh install is completely successful. Since i had a broken install to clean up, first I had clean up the the plugins. The real player plugin for browsers is call rpnp.so. Doing a search for all files of this name makes cleanup easier.

The shell returned all kinds of locations

I went to each of these EXCEPT the main file in /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/rpnp.so and deleted all of the copies EXCEPT the "real" copy. Acutally I was just deleting sym links. More on this shortly. To get a reinstall OR a fresh install of realplayer working from a browser on Linux, each browsers plugins directory has to contain a copy of or a link to the rpnp.so file. As I understand, it is better to use a symbolic link rather than copy the real file for lots of reasons, including space considerations and maintanence issues.

To create the sym links, locate each plugin directory using a

find / -name plugins

On my machine this returned

/usr/lib/qt3/plugins
/usr/lib/kde3/plugins
/usr/lib/xine/plugins
/usr/lib/opera/plugins
/usr/lib/XandrosSMA/plugins
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
/usr/lib/netscape/plugins
/usr/local/mozilla/plugins
/usr/local/netscape/plugins
/usr/share/qt3/plugins
/usr/share/apps/kate/plugins
/usr/share/apps/digikam/plugins
/usr/share/apps/khelpcenter/plugins
/usr/share/apps/XandrosFileManager/plugins
/usr/share/apps/kdeprint/plugins
/usr/share/apps/korganizer/plugins
/root/.kde/share/apps/XandrosFileManager/plugins
/root/.netscape/plugins


The key files are as follows because they are plugin directories for browsers rather than some other program.

/usr/lib/opera/plugins
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
/usr/lib/netscape/plugins
/usr/local/mozilla/plugins
/usr/local/netscape/plugins

Next create symlinks for each directory in turn

ln -s /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/rpnp.so /usr/lib/opera/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/rpnp.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/rpnp.so /usr/lib/netscape/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/rpnp.so /usr/local/mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/rpnp.so /usr/local/netscape/plugins

Click a real player web link and see if it works. On my machine, this repair worked.

very nice guide. Good work