Hi. I just installed Debian Sarge and have been running it for the past couple of days. I tried to install MPlayer and thought I was successful, but when I go to run it I get this:

mplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libaa.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Could someone please tell me what I can do to get MPlayer up and running on my system?

Thanks

Install aalib1

And you may want to install apt-file so you can search if you encounter similar problems in the future.

I already had aalib1 installed on my system but I re-installed it and then I got mplayer to run.

I installed apt-file but when I type in:

apt-file search libaa.so.1

I get nothing. Could you please go into more detail on how I can use apt-file to solve future problems such as this one.

Thank you for your help.

It is like apt-get you use apt-file update to in this case build the starting cache then you can search. BTW the other options can be found with a man apt-file.

I discovered another problem with my mplayer installation, I can open any media file using mplayer but when i try to open the same file in gmplayer some media files don't work. It seems like mplayer has access to all of the audio files and gmplayer doesn't. For instance, I can open a movie clip in mplayer, and then when I open it in gmplayer I don't get any audio or it doesn't work at all.

and another question:

Is there any way I can search for packages that I don't need, to clean up my installation? Like searching for packages that don't have any dependencies?

Thanks

# apt-get install deborphan
# man deborphan

For the mplayer vs gmplayer problem try using the gmplayer from the command line so you get to see the output in a console it may give you a clue as to what the errors are, another program you may want to try is vlc the Videolan player or maybe even Kaffeine.