this is sort of a question within a question....

i am on the trail of getting dvd's to work.
I currently have the following installed:
mplayer-0.9pre6-1
xine-0.9.8-4
vlc-0.2.91-1
ogle-0.8.5-1
libcss-0.1.0-5
libdvdread-0.9.3-fr2cvs
xanim-2801-2

i am getting absolutley nowhere....I've been opening the disk in galeon (as file browser) and choosing "open with..." for the actual film .VOB files, from the right click menu.

one of the things i have run into is creating a symbolic link twitx /dev/dvd and /mnt/dvd ???
Whilst i sort of understand the theory i don't really understand the mechanics of echieving this.
I know it's a ln -s command, but what comes after that.
Current hardware is as follows: 1xhard drive, 2x cd drives, cd-rw as master and dvd as slave both on 2nd IDE channel.


Can someone point me in the right direction please?????

and do i need to enable 32bit I/O support for dvd drive ????


many thanks

Well first off, if your going to be playing DVD's, there really is no need to create a /mnt/dvd. You should just be able to use the existing /dev/dvd as your device to play from. Usually when creating a /mnt/dvd.. etc, its creating an empty directory so you can mount and view data cd's or dvd's. Media like CD's and DVD's you cannot mount.

But if you really need to know how to create a link, it would go like this:

ln -s [source] [destination]

So you could do something like this:

ln -s /dev/dvd /mnt/dvd

And about installing those packages, don't use the browser, install from the command line. What type of files are they, source or RPM ??

so far, on the whole, i've been using RPM's.
I have tried the source ./configure/make/make install route and though this has sometimes worked, it has at other times yielded errors that are way beyond me.

Is it better to compile then install rather than install from rpm?

i have tried all of the DVD "players" from the command line (though not using options) and everytime get errors.