According to deb-multimedia.org, the repositories for debian-multimedia for lenny were broken a while ago and are no longer available. I tried a couple of mirrors but to no avail. I have a machine that for a couple of reasons needs to remain at lenny for a while. Does anyone know if the deb-multimedia repository is available somewhere for lenny in any form, in particular mplayer and related libraries and codecs? Have found a few ideas 'round the net but nothing worked out.

oldstable was restored, you need to choose a mirror and point it to oldstable or lenny. Not all mirrors will have oldstable/lenny.

http://deb-multimedia.org/debian-m

I tried updating my /etc/apt/sources.list with a couple of mirrors (one at a time) from http://deb-multimedia.org/debian-m-oldstable, but got 404 Not Found errors like this:

Also, at the top of the page is says "As Debian, oldstable has been removed.".

I could of course go through the list and try one by one, but does anyone know of a mirror (or other sources, even a site with installed binaries would be fine at this point...) that works?

That mirror does have oldstable deb-multimedia:

http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/debian-mul...sts/oldstable/

Probably the syntax is wrong in your sources.

//edit: no "probably" about it - post your sources.

I copied the line from http://deb-multimedia/debian-m-oldstable verbatim into my /etc/apt/sources.lst:

I tried the heanet repo in ireland and it's still up:

Install the keyring as normal and it should be ok.

Don't depend on this forever - Lenny is no longer supported, so technically your system is vulnerable. Update to Squeeze (stable) which will still be supported until early 2014.

If you can explain your "couple of reasons", people may be able to advise you...

Primarily, the reason for remaining at Lenny is mainly because the graphics card in the machine in question (an IBM T43 laptop with ATI Radeon X300 graphics) is not supported by the ATI driver in Squeeze. Or rather, Squeeze utilizes Xorg 7.7, whereas the last ATI driver that supports the X300 graphics only works with Xorg up to 7.6 (I might be one step off with the version numbers here, but the basic story is the same). There is a free Radeon driver in Squeeze but its 3D support abysmal compared to the proprietary ATI driver unfortunately. I've got another machine (a T61) running Squeeze, which is my primary machine, but graphics performance again is down when it comes to 3D performance. The T43 with X300 graphics beats the T61 big time in this respect. My only reason really for hanging onto the T43 is because of this; I'll be using it for playing games mostly, and viewing the occasional film. (Yes, a more modern machine might able to handle all this beautifully, but is not within the budget at this time; besides, I like the 4:3 format of the T43 and T61 and can't really say the advantage of going widescreen). While fiddling about with it (up- and downgrading) I lost the debian-multimedia files. While my user directories are securely backed up I rarely do that with the operating system as I feel it's easier to re-install rather than restore a backup.

Anyway, thanks for the link above. However, although it doesn't generate any error messages, but something is still amiss: after doing an apt-get update, followed by an apt-cache policy mplayer, it only shows me one installation candidate, not two as it should be (one from Lenny and one from debian-multimedia):

Oddly enough, doing the same thing for something that's only available in debian-multimedia, such as mencoder results in
rather than for instance
when querying for mp3fs.

Blame AMD...

Seriously AMD chose to end support for the X series GPUs and soon support will also end for the HD 2/3/4 series GPUs. There is no one to blame for this apart from AMD... having to let AMD dictate that you stick with unsupported software is also a real pity.

Depending on what kind of 3D we're talking about, the Radeon driver may still be an option, but to get the best out of it, you'd need to be running testing or unstable.

I'm afraid I'm out of ideas with the deb-multimedia stuff...

Did you try getting libgl1-mesa-dri or similar? Its makes a huge difference compared to 'out of the box' performance for those older cards.

nVidia has pretty much discontinued close driver support for cards that old as well (GF4 and previous, and to some degree for FX/5XXX cards as well)

Closed source driver support wont last for ever, no matter what company hardware you get.

Yes, I agree. Some companies tend to release their software in source format once their own support has ended, don't know if any graphics card manfufacturers fall in this category though. And probably there are aspects of more modern cards that would be revealed if the driver code for older cards would become openly available. As for ATI it seems they've even stopped producing release documents for the Linux driver which shows their level of committment.
In this case it's the game Minecraft, where with the video requirements turned down in the came itself I can get between 20 and 40 fps on the T43 with the ATI X300 driver (it varies hugely depending on the actual game scene), but only 10 fps or lower with the open-source Radeon driver in Squeeze. Haven't tried unstable or testing though - perhaps I should. Ok, thanks for the help though. I might try some more mirrors to see if I get somewhere, but it seems that even if some mirrors have some sort of reference to Lenny, the actual files aren't there.

But surely, someone must have a backed-up repository copy, or even access to a machine running Lenny from which I could get a copy of the relevant binaries?

Yes, I've enabled DRI (libgl1-mesa-dri + some tweaking), without it Minecraft won't even start in this case.
Very true. I guess some of us are just trying to eek a couple of years more use out of our old hardware.

One alternative would be to downgrade X in Squeeze to a version where the X300-compatible fglrx driver would work. Anyone have any thoughts on the feasibility of this? I'm not sure what newer Xorg versions bring to the table compared to older ones.

The HD 4xxx series GPUs (R700) are no where near as old as the Geforce 4...

The R700 only dates back to 2008, the Geforce 4 and FX are from 2003 and earlier...

Also nvidia provide legacy driver support, where AMD do not...

But I'm not a fanboi of either brand. Proprietary drivers in general are good for two things: 3D acceleration and power management. If you don't have strict/demanding requirements for either, then they're best avoided.

The free drivers (radeon and nouveau) support KMS and have better "2D acceleration" by far (very noticeable on lower end systems).

For something like that you want gallium3D support rather than classic mesa, so testing (or unstable) would be the best option. You should get significantly better performance from gallium.

I hope everyone has noticed that "debian-multimedia.org" has been renamed to "deb-multimedia.org", and your sources should be changed appropriately. The homepage explains why.

Yes, the move to deb-multimedia.org was duly noted ...

Caravel, thanks for the pointer to Gallium3D. I actually found an article (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...00g_slow&num=1) where they've compared the latest Gallium3D with the old fglrx driver on an ATI X300 GPU. While performance is still down by 50% compared to the ATI driver, that may be good enough for my uses, so I'm going to have to investigate this further.