I have installed Real Player 8 on my new RedHat 9 installation and I can not get it to launch. I have experimented with several other versions of RedHat, and other distros as well, and I have never had this problem. Each time I click on a Real link in a website or try to launch the player as a stand alone, it hangs and I have to go in to the system monitor to kill the process. I have uninstalled and reinstalled several times with the RPM. I tried using the .bin file that was available, but received an error message saying that the system could not read the file.

Has anyone else had this problem with RedHat 9? Also, is there a reason RedHat does not have Real Audio, Java, and Flash ready to go out of the box. With all of the good things that they do, it makes no sense to me that they would leave something as major as essential browser plugins out of the initial installation.

Please advise, and thanks in advance for your help.

i'd say either use realone instead (realplayer 9) or go native with mplayer.

Seconded, Real seem instutionally incapable of writing good Linux software. RealPlayer 8 is horribly crash prone, simply seeking within a stream will cause it to segfault. Use mplayer, it's easier.

welcome to the world of nice guys trying to interact with money grabbing companies... licensing issues get in the way meaning they can't always distribute closed software. Also redhat did go a bit OTT about closed source codecs, removing mp3 even...

See my answer here
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I had the same problem. Lets see, I think I got the version from rpmfind.net here then I didn't uninstall the non working one, I just did a update (-Uvh) with a force install and it worked.

I think the problem was when I was filling out the information right before it launches for the first time - somehow it locked realplayer up and it would never launch. Skip that part if possible.

I managed to get RealPlayer 8 to work with Redhat 9. What I did is use the source rpm found on this page: http://rpmseek.com/rpm-pl/RealPlayer...=real:PN:0:0:0

It seems to work.

The source RPM worked! Thank you so much for your assistance.