Seven years ago I went through a painful process to get vlc player installed and running on CentOS 6. With help from members of the CentOS community and the Scientific Linux community I finally overcame the issues and it has been running fine since.

About a year ago I decided to start using CentOS 7 on a test PC. vlc installed without a hitch from the nux-dextop repo. A great improvement! I now have 3 PCs and 2 servers running CentOS 7. The PCs all have vlc running. I am now building a CentOS 7 install on my new main PC. When I attempt to install vlc I get an error to the effect that Here are some interesting factoids:

I am trying to install vlc-2.2.2-6.el7.nux.x86_64
I have 3 PCs running vlc-2.2.2-6.el7.nux.x86_64
I queried one of themThe question is... why did vlc install last year and why does it run with a library which does not exist?

Upon searching I see that rpmfind.net tells me the library is in libprojectM-2.1.0-2.el7.x86_64.html which I suspect should be in the epel repo. Actually it appears to be in the nux repo. So I installed the package. vlc will still not install. The same library/dependency is still missing. I then did some diggingIt looks like the library installed from libprojectM was not provided by libprojectM yet it is part of that package and is in fact in place on the new PC. However, vlc still thinks it is missing. Is this something wrong with the rpm database? Is it something I can manually shove into the rpm database? Help!

TIA,

Ken

It gets better...

I have a CentOS 7 virtual machine (VMWare Workstation) which I built over the past couple of weeks. Same repos and basically - best as I can tell at this point - same configuration as the new PC. I have been building the new PC from my build notes from the VM. vlc installs no problem on the VM.

Ken

One step forward, three steps back. Late last evening I hosed up the build trying to get the Nvidia driver working. Selecting Nvidia in BIOS allows both the Nvidia card and the Intel built in GPU to be active. Auto allows only the Nvidia card to be active. Real clear. Anyhow I restored a Clonezilla snapshot and started installing things again. Seems that I neglected to fill in the priority-10 line for [epel]. I had it for [epel-debuginfo]. Not sure how I overlooked. Anyhow I made the correction and now vlc will install.

Ken

Sorry that you are having a rough time. If you have any questions be sure to ask.

After reading through your posts I have to ask "Why Centos?"

Centos is a Community Enterprise OS that is geared towards servers, not graphics or games.

Thanks szboardstretcher,

One thing I dislike about Linux in general and CentOS in particular is that it is TOO STABLE. Once I had CentOS 6 up and running I began to forget how to do things. This has been a great refresher in the use of the rpm command which I used to know something about I am wondering if I should start over from my minimal install, triple check my repo priorities and install everything again. I have step by step notes documented so it is simply a matter of copy/paste into an ssh terminal from my regular PC. Sometimes I think that I need to teach a PC what it needs to run by building it a few times. More likely it is a matter of correcting MY typos

Thanks again,

Ken

I also run CentOS on my desktop and laptop. The reason I don't run Fedora is because of the choice the devs have made to disembowel Nautilus. I like Gnome3 very much, but unfortunately the Fedora version of Nautilus is a disgrace. They seem to be on a mission to make it less useful every release. I've tried using other file managers, but I really like the version of nautilus in CentOS.

I'll stick with CentOS until the time they "upgrade" Nautilus to a dysfunctional mess like they have with Fedora. Once that happens I'll look for a replacement.

Thanks Danny Michael for pointing me back to szboardstretcher's reply and to szboardstretcher, pardon me for missing your point.

I started playing with Linux with RedHat 5.something. And then 6.something. Had no idea really what I was doing. But I was learning. By 7.2 I had a working file (Samba) and print server going. 8.0 really impressed me. My "server" was a home made Athlon PC. The no-name system board died. I had a second home made Athlon PC so I put all the parts in a pile and built a new "server" with the faster server from the original server, the mother board from the second PC complete with onboard NIC, a video card from somewhere etc. I put the hard drive from the "server" into this mess and booted it up. Anaconda said "can't find that hardware... deleting it" "found new hardware... installing it" until it had sorted out the new machine. I rebooted and my Samba and print server was back on my LAN! I played with 9 and Enterprise Workstation I think it was called. Then I started on the Fedora path up to about 4 or 5.

I stumbled across an Ubuntu 6.something iso on Usenet. Why it was posted to Usenet I have no idea. I had never heard of Ubuntu but I had a look. I learned that Dell was shipping it on some of their PCs. I installed it on a test PC and gave it a test. I plugged in a flash drive containing some MS Office files and some multi-media files. Word and Excel files of course opened in Open Office just fine. I clicked on an mp3. "No program available to open this file" same as on the Hat side. However, Ubuntu did not tell me to contact my administrator. Rather it asked if I would like to find a program? It presented me a list rated 1 to 5 stars. I chose a 5 star program and my mp3 began to play. Same with the video files. I was impressed!!!

I started using Ubuntu 7.2 about half and half with XP. By 8.04 LTS I was using Linux pretty much full time. I purchased a new PC in 2009. Unfortunately 8.04 would not recognize the newer hardware. I ended up running 9.10. When 10.04 LTS came out I decided to install it. Unfortunately my two monitor "separate X screens" configuration from 9.10 would not work. It did work on CentOS 6 and that is why I am running CentOS. Of course my separate X screens are problematic on CentOS 7 - worked reasonably well a year ago at ~7.1. The current 7.3 NOPE.

My CentOS 7 plan B is to have CentOS 7 on the PC and a CentOS 7 guest running in VMWare on the second monitor. It will be configured to always be on the visible workspace. This will allow me to flip between workspaces on the host and not loose sight of the VM which will be primarily email and browser - same as my current second monitor. I will of course have multiple workspaces on the VM if needed and the file systems on the host will be tied to the guest with nfs and autofs. I have all this running on a test PC and am in the process of putting it all together on my new Dell Precision Workstation.

As to Gnome 3... I can not tolerate it. Probably because I cannot figure it out. I want my OS to support the programs I wish to run and do work with. I do not want the OS interface to be a major undertaking in and of itself. Then gnome panel is the biggest improvement in user interface since the quick launch thing on XP. I had XP bottom bar two rows high with about a dozen most commonly used programs in quick launch. The Mate desktop derived from Gnome 2 is SIMPLE and good enough for me.

As far as a file manager... I do not think anything can match File Manager (aka winfile) from Windows NT. The one on Win 9.x was crap but the version on NT handled long file names, permissions etc. I could do a heck of a lot from the keyboard. Rarely needed to touch the mouse. I used it on XP for many years and even found a port of it for Windows 7. On Linux I use gnome-commander. The version on CentOS 6 is somewhat dated so it is a bit of a re-learning curve to the CentOS 7 version. I guess I am used to the old foibles

As to Fedora... it changes too much - by design. I like stability and CentOS gives me that. And back to Ubuntu... even 16.04 will not support separate X screens.

Ken

p.s. I should be running a blog