Using synaptic I downloaded mplayer and opened it by clicking on the icon in the multimedia section. It worked mostly. I messed with the settings in config. Still only partial operation.

Today I crank up to continue troubleshooting and I can't get mplayer to open. I clicked on the icon, nothing. A newsgroup reply told me to try gmplayer on the command line. I did and this is what I got:

MPlayer dev-CVS--3.3.2 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team

CPU: Intel Pentium 4/Xeon/Celeron Foster 2114 MHz (Family: 8, Stepping: 9)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Reading config file /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf: No such file or directory
Reading config file /home/duqu/.mplayer/config
[cfg] read config file: /home/duqu/.mplayer/gui.conf
Reading config file /home/duqu/.mplayer/gui.conf
Segmentation fault

I thought I could remove mplayer and start again, but when I did "rpm -e mplayerxxxxx.rpm The response was; mplayerxxxxxx.rpm is not installed.

A file search for mplayer returned 38 responses.

try:

#apt-get --purge remove mplayer

Thanks, I did. Here's what happened.

[root@localhost duqu]# apt-get --purge remove mplayer
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
mplayer* mplayer-skins*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 removed and 94 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 25.8MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Committing changes...
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
Done.

What about the stuff that wasn't removed. Do you think it will confuse a re-install?

It might...it depends on what was wrong. Try it. If it doesn't work. Post back and we'll track it down.

It worked; I now get an mplayer gui when I click on the icon. It worked so well I used the same procedure to rejuvinate another program. And I wrote it down so I won't have to ask again.

Thanks

Cool! Glad I could help.

Check out:

man apt
man apt-get
man apt-cache
man apt-conf
man sources.list

for more info about apt...it is really the program you are running when you run synaptic.

Oh and I just noticed...you tried to specify the entire package name for using rpm -e.

Just use the name of the app when using rpm -e...like this:

#rpm -e mplayer

Just in case

I looked in man apt and got the correct syntax for the apt-get package name not file name.
Now that I have learned to use apt-get , somewhat, Synaptic doesn't get used as often.