can't open any audio media players
 

You need codecs, an effective way I found to get them was throught Automatix2 at www.getautomatix.com

huh?? :confused:
 

go to the media codecs and get the basic media codecs whatever they are, codecs are things that give the player instructions on how to play that media extension

is he using ubuntu automatix is not gonna help if hes not using ubuntu

=^.^=
 

Hello theonetoblame!
So, you're using ubuntu. OK. I am glad to hear that you can now play and of course listen to your music. I'll make a suggestion, so you will have less trouble in the future. Ubuntu provides a very powerful package manager: Synaptic. Open it, type in the root password when asked, and press the search button. Search for these: w32codecs and madplay.
These packages will solve a lot of problems, which didn't even occurred yet. w32codecs for example, provides a lot of codecs not only for music, but for movies too. With this installed, you will be able to play most video formats with Xine or MPlayer movie players. If Synaptic cannot find w32codecs, you can do one of these things to install this very essential codecs package:

1. In synaptic go to Settings menu, and there click Repositories. Here press New, and select from the scroll-down menu the Binary (deb) option.
In URI line add this: http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/
At the Distribution line add your ubuntu version (breezy, dapper, edgy, feisty or gutsy). Add only one!
At Section(s) line you will need this: free non-free
Press Reload button, and search again for w32codecs.
I recommend this install solution, since this repo will provide you not only this, but other useful packages too.

2. Open a web browser and go here: http://www2.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/rel...061022.tar.bz2 This will download the codecs tarball, but this way you will need to copy the codecs manually to the right directory. Where to copy? Here: /usr/lib/codecs/ This should work.

To handle all kinds of compressed files/archives, you will need some packages. Go to Synaptic again, and search for these: tar, bzip2, gzip, p7zip, unzip, zip, rar, unrar, unrar-free, arj, unace, and lzop. With these installed, you will be able to handle most of your compressed archives.

So, you're she. And what brought you to start using Linux? I'm just interested. It is not a negative question, I am just impressed.

Ok. Then press Add. I use Mepis, it is ubuntu based you know, but as we can see there can be some differences. Press add, and type the things I told you in my previous post, so it should work. If the lines like URI, Distribution and Section(s) appear, and they are all blank, you are in the right place.

Sorry. I forgot to mention, that in /usr/lib/ the codecs dir doesn't exist as default, so you have to create one. How did you try to access that folder? In linux as a user you cannot write too much folders, except in /home/ folders for example. If you're logged in as a user (highly recommnded), than you will need to do the following to create that dir. Go to synaptic, and search for package mc. This is Midnight Commander, a clone of Norton Commander (was used in DOS times) for linux. Install it. Open a terminal window, and type su. It will ask for root password, so type in and press ENTER. Now, you're terminal window is now has root permissions. Type mc, and Midnight Commander will start. Here navigate to /usr/lib/ and press F7 key. This will create a new folder, name the folder codecs, and press ENTER. Voila, your codecs folder is now created. With mc you can also access your tarballs, I mean you don't need to extract the contents before copying to somewhere, but mc navigates into the tarball like into a folder. Go inside your codecs tarball, and press F5 key to copy. The other side of mc should be the destination folder.

Well, I am even more impressed. You not only listened to your friend, but you heard him. That is a huge step forward! Really! You know, I hate Window$ too (most of true Linux users do hate it I think), and I did tell "things" about it, and I told people why Open-Source is good, but everybody just listened (I think most girls don't even do that). Nothing more. I can't tell yet, that I converted somebody. Nobody wants to take some time to give it a try. I think this is the biggest problem. They say Win is better, but they say it because they cannot compare it with something else. So: I am really happy that you're not one of those people. ;) One more thing: I am very interested, how long your friend was talking about Linux until you did give it a try?

D:<
 

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

This is very very interesting. Can't you send a print-screen of your synaptic? If I could see it, I could tell what to do.
mc should be installed through Synaptic. Press search button there, type mc, mark for installation and apply. After installation is complete, try to start mc again.

su is not a program, it is a command to switch you to Super User (root) mode. Root is the same as Administrator, but this word is used in linux world. Shorter name for Admin. you need to type your admin password there, if doesn't work, try your user password. I don't like ubuntu because of this confused user management. In other distros it is very clear who is the user and who is the root. In ubuntu, well, it is mixed somehow. I never liked when I needed to type the same password as my user password, and there were no real root account. Thats why I never used ubuntu for long time.
my stereotypical?
I think I have much more complex conception about girls. I don't think about them like every girl is the same. I'm not the guy who says this well known phrase: "you know them... girls..." Only those have such thoughts about girls, who never really speak with them.
You are a very good example for what did I say. Not every girl is the same, and true what is true, you are even less the same than others. This is good to see that someone does something against that picture you told before. :)

XoX
 

Quote:

Can't you send a print-screen of your synaptic?

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u...earchformc.png
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u...insettings.png
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u...oblems/add.png

i searched for mc, but it wasnt there... or at least, i didnt see it. maybe i looked in the wrong places.

i was not aware that the root (admin) password was different from the user password. i have no idea which is which. i only know the password i use to login, but i am the only user name there is, so i guess i am the admin. but would that not make my password the admin, and therefore root, password? only it didnt work to change to super user.

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u...ionfailure.png

well not your stereotypical female... yours because it was you who I was talking to, but not like yours because theyre yours, like they belong to you, or that they are the stereotypes that you agree with or believe or anything...

i did not mean to imply in any way that it was your stereotypical thinking to which i was ranting about. just stereotypes in general. honestly i cant judge you (or anyone, really), i havent even met you, i have no idea what kind of person you are or how you act/what you believe. so im not dissing you (sorry if it seemed that way)

and i didnt mean it like all females are like that, just that that is society's stereotypical view of women... but not that everyone believes that either. but for anyone who does, I want to prove them wrong... I know several men, including some of my teachers and one of my pastors who are biased against women and are still stuck in the thinking that women cant have jobs, they stay at home and love to cook/clean/etc. its annoying to be grouped in a "category" because of gender...

sorry if i insulted you in any way...

...

im done

nonononoooo.... :) You're definatelly not looking at the right place. I think I need to send my printscreens to show you. OK? Well, check these: http://www.fotokep.hu/v/pusrob/LQ/repo+in+menu.png.html
On the right side of the image, you will see small thumbnails, click on the next, so you will see it in big. They are in the right order. If you accidently browse my folder, on left (under véletlen képek) will be random images from the whole site, not my pictures. If you see a girl, a tree, a cat, etc. on those pictures, thats not me.
It cannot be. Check screenshots again: the last two pictures. Don't forget to scroll down in results, when search is completed.
Commonly in distros you cannot login as root from graphical login, as this "feature" is turned off. Who installed your Ubuntu? You or somebody else? If not you, you should ask for the root password. As I remember correctly, even in ubuntu it is asked to give a root password, during installation process.
Commonly no. In Ubuntu everything is possible. As I told you before, ubuntu has a "special" user management, which I don't really understand how works. In any other distro everything is clear.
Sorry, but it is too complicated for me, I don't really understand what did you write up here :) Could you say it again in a less complicated form? Thanks.
You don't have to apologize. You didn't say anything wrong.
Actually, you have a point. Regrettably, I can't say you're wrong, because it's true.
I had such a teacher too. On every lesson we had, he told something "negative" (to express myself "softly") about women. To sum up what he told on every lesson: girls are good for nothing. Sad. I don't understand how can a teacher be such a "gender-hater".
I am sad to see that this is happening in the 21st century. Decades went by, but still happening... :(
You didn't insult me in any way, so don't have bad feelings about this ;) .
P.S.: nice computer name you have... :D

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u...blems/nomc.png
this is the exact screen that comes up when i search for 'mc.' the only thing even remotely close is mcpp, which has nothing to do with midnight commander
from the above screen i clicked on settings, then repositories, and the window that came up had the title 'software preferences,' like the second url i sent before. i dont know what to do, its obviously not giving me the right window, or something else is wrong. but i clicked on repositories.

its good to hear that you are not a girl or a tree or a cat ^.^

HA HA!!!! i just figured out how to access the root user name and change the password! and i went to a terminal and typed in su and it worked!!! <.< now i have no idea what to do next... *goes to read previous posts* oh, yes... i still need mc :p

basically, when i said your stereotypical female, i meant it as a general term. i used your because i am talking to you; i did not mean that those were the stereotypes you, specifically, agreed with or believed in. savie?:)

^u^ glad you like it

OK. Nothing in repos. Quite interesting. There is an option in these situations. When you don't find something, vivit the following web page: http://packages.ubuntu.com/
Here use the search field of course. Now, I did it for you, so visit this page: http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/s...ge=2&number=50
Scroll down, and you will find mc (at 3/4 part of scroll bar). Click on the name of your Ubuntu version, scroll down on this page to "Download mc" section, and choose i386 architecture (click on it). On this page choose a mirror, and download the file.
After you downloaded the file, open terminal, su it, and navigate to your mc file. Here type this: apt -i "mc package name". A suggestion here: whenyou start typing the long mc package name, do this: type in the first 3 letters of the package name, and then press the TAB key. It will then automatically "type in" the following letters for you. When you installed mc, you will be able to handle separatelly downloaded packages with it. mc is a very handy tool.
Thanks. Now I understand.
listening to rock music, eh? :)

its all there now. i downloaded the mc package and then used su in terminal to copy it to the codecs folder i created.

i am now attempting to download the w32codecs package you mentioned in your first post, which was, i believe, the original reason for getting mc in the first place (though not the only reason, of course). its not working though. the internet page is still "loading," which it has been doing for the past 15 min.

what was this for?:confused:

this didnt work. when i hit tab it just tabbed over to the column on the other side of the window

rock music is my life :) rock and screamo and heavy metal... all christian though (which many people dont think is possible, to have christian rock or christian screamo, but it is, and its all i listen to

Don't copy the mc.deb file to the codecs folder.
apt -i "mc package name": did I really typed this? This is not a valid command! Ouch!!! I don't know where were my thoughts. The valid command is the following: mc-name.deb is the full name of your downloaded deb file. Sorry. This should work. This command installs the mc package, if not using Synaptic.
I guess you are talking about mc now. So you installed it somehow. Good. The TAB "auto typer" works only in terminal, and only when nothing is running in it (like mc).
You're using firefox. Right? Well, firefox has a strange behavior when people try to download something. You press the link to download the file, and then it does nothing, at least it seems that it does nothing. Same for me. I figured out something: When I press to download something, firefox downloads the file, and when the download is more or less completed, only then it asks if I want to save it or not. I hate this behavior, thats why (there were other reasons too) I switched from firefox to Opera and Konqueror.
So, if you have mc, now you can copy the contents of your codecs tarball to the correct place. Your video players (Xine, MPlayer, or both) will automatically detect the codecs there. Nothing should be done afterwards. This is a very important package, because other players use xine or mplayer engine to play a movie or music. For example amarok, kmplayer, kaffeine, browser embedded players, etc. I recommend you to install both (xine + mplayer), because they don't behave in the same way. You can meet video formats, that will play in mplayer correctly, but in xine not, and the other option can happen too (xine good, mplayer no).
Aham. Thats really nice. How many years are you listening to rock music? I do listen to Rock too. Mainly, I listen something from these subgenres: Viking Metal, Melodic Death Metal, Melodic Black Metal, Folk Metal, Progressive Metal and Gothic Metal.

im sorry, but what are codec tarballs? whats a tarball? :scratch:

i think i downloaded the codecs from http://www2.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/rel...061022.tar.bz2,
(what you said to do in your first post), but i cant be sure. there's just a box icon on my desktop. does it need to be moved somewhere? and how do i know that it was actually downloaded, or that it will do what its supposed to (by the way, what, exactly, is it supposed to do?)? o.O

a few years now... a friend of my introduced me to an online rock station ( http://therockhd.com ) and ive been listening ever since :)

and i finally got my internal speakers working :D i went to alsamixer with terminal (on the advice of one of my other friends) and tried un-muting everything (when i had done this before, i couldnt figure out where the mute/unmute button was :) ), and when i unmuted the master mono (which i hadnt even realized was muted), everything worked :p

tarball is kind of slang(?) name for the "tar-ed" compressed archives. It is shorter and easier to say, than targzipped archive. So: if an archive was compressed using tar, it is a tarball. Most common: *.tar.gz or *.tar.bz2. Tar actually does not compress anything, it only packs (without compression) many files into one big file. This technology was invented, when people used tapes for storing data. Tapes couldn't store filenames, extensions and permissions so something was needed to make life easier. It was TAR (Tape ARchive). Tar was able to store names, extensions and everything, so after copying data back to computer, people could add any name to the file with a .tar at the end, so they could unpack files out there as they were before putting them onto the tape. Gz and bz2 are gzip and bzip2, they are the thing which actually compress the stuff. These apps can only compress one file. Here is where tar comes back. Tar pack the files into one file, than gzip or bzip2 compresses it, so you have a compressed archive which contains many files. It was not needed to design a file compresser, which can handle many files at one time. Cool, eh?
That is your downloaded codecs tarball. Open mc and go here: /home/theonetoblame/Desktop I think you will find the file there, or you just can drag 'n drop to a more suitable place (/home/theonetoblame/temp for example).Open mc, and go to the tarball of yours, hit enter on it, so mc will go inside the archive. On the other panel of mc go to /usr/lib/codecs/ or usr/local/lib/codecs. The readme file says that the first path is good if using a prebuilt (you have this) package. Copy the contents of the tarball (without the dir!!! only what is inside the dir). You can do this: go to the side of the contents, hit * and than press F5. It will do the rest.
Codecs decode compressed videos so, you can watch them. The same as you need a codec if you want to play mp3s (libmad).
Understood. I can recommend something too. This is: http://www.chronixradio.com/
This is a very good station. It has 3 channels: ChroniX Aggression, ChroniX Metal and CroniX Grit. They are all Metal channels, so you just choose one. This station also supports Linux too. Hehe. Not every station does this. Use XMMS to tune in. Did you know that XMMS can use classic Winamp skins, and you can import the winamp presets?
So you only listen to radio? Don't you have any own music? Any favorites? Interesting.
Good to see that you figure out things on your own too :) .

cool, but just a bit confusing :) lots of new lingo to learn, i guess

do i want a bunch of loose files floating around in my /usr/lib/codecs folder? O.o this seems strange, why not just copy the whole dir?

makes sense...

??
i do not know what XMMS is, but i use Beep Media Player for my regular mp3 songs, and ive been trying to download some WinAmp skins for it, only some work and some dont.

goodness, no. i have tons of songs/cds of my own, im not radio-dependent :) just most of the artists that i now listen to i heard for the first time on that station =D and of course, after listening to plugs on the radio for concerts of my favorite bands and going to the concerts, i hear new bands too that i like. so i buy cds, or get songs for $0.88 at Walmart.com, or share with my friends... i currently have almost 250 songs on my mp3 player alone, not counting all the ones currently stored on my other harddrive :D

Not too much. Just learn the basics, and than you will learn the others with time.
This is 100% sure. That is why you created the codecs dir in /usr/lib a few days ago.
XMMS: X MultiMedia System. A music player, looks same as beep player, but can handle every classic Winamp skins. It is a quite old linux application, but it's still developed. You can install it from Synaptic too. It won many awards since its existance.
250 on your player? Nice. It has a big storage capacity I guess. On your HDDs you must have much more I think.

hmm... i most definitely must look into this... :3 :3
although i looked for it in Synaptic, but did not see it. im afraid my synaptic is a bit outdated, or something... = ) it doesnt seem to have anything im looking for lol. ill just google it online, im sure i can find a free download somewhere : )

its a 1 gig ... and yes, i have more than twice that number on my harddrive :)

...

well, thank you for all the help youve given me to help me get started in linux :D i cant begin to tell you how much it is appreciated

ttyl :)

Maybe you didn't reload your package list. Press the reload button in Synaptic, and try again. Periodically do this reload (once a week), since this is the only way to know if there are some new/upgradable packages. After pressing reload Synaptic downloads something from the net, it is good. If no, only trying to get something from CD-s, its bad.
I am sure you will collect some more music, like me.
Nothing to thank here, since this is why this forum exists. People ask, other people help. If you have other questions, just ask it in the correct forums, and somebody surely will help.
P.S.: what is ttyl?

i found it, but it was in applications, under add/remove... so i installed it, and now i have lots of new skins for it :D

Talk To Ya Later :)

I am happy you found it. Happy further linuxing!
ttyl :)