Ok. I've got a few questions...

I was just wondering if anyone knew of a good way of controlling a console mp3 player with a joystick..

I'm using Redhat 8.0, and would appreciate any suggestions you might have.

I would just use Xmms, but I'd prefer a console player, and every timed I tried to start Xmms, it died saying 'segmentation fault' which I translated to mean "nope, I don't feel like working, and I won't say why".

Then Xmms gave me a raspberry and trotted away giggling like a school girl. It was quite embarassing. But that's another story.

I also tried something called jsd, but that was a similar experience.

Also, does Redhat 8 come with joystick support as default? I read that the 2.4 kernels can be compiled to support joysticks (and mine, Gravis GamePad Pro is listed in the supported hardware in the joystick driver docs), but does Redhat 8.0 come precompiled that way, or do I need to re-compile the kernel (which I'm sure will be another adventure) with the joystick drivers? I'm currently running the 2.4.18-14 kernel on Redhat 8.0.

Cheers,

-Cap'n J.

mp3blaster is great console mp3 player. It also plays oggs and even streaming audio.

It's keys are customizable so if you can figure out what your joystick keys would be called, you can probably get it setup to work with it. the file to edit for your keys is ~/.mp3blasterrc but you need to copy it there from the install folder, the file to copy is .mp3blasterrc.sample

Cool

Thanks MasterC!

Mp3blaster seems to work great. I couldn't figure out how to map the joystick keys, but I found a Joy2Key program, which does all the hard work for me.

Unfortunately, it seems nothing can access my soundcard or joystick unless I run it as root, which is something I tend to get the feeling I really shouldn't do.

Being a quasi-newb, I have no idea how to fix this (or if it's really an issue). But I'll keep reading docs and see what I come up with.

Thanks again,

-Cap'n J.

Try chowning or chmoding the file so that other users can see/run it. Basically, chown allows you to change the owner of the file, and chmod allows you to change who can see, execute and write-to the given file. If the file is owned by root, and others can't execute it then no-one will be able to run it except root. If you either change the permissions (chmod) so that others can run it, or change the owner of the file (chown) to your username, then you might be able to run it as someone other than root.

Just a thought.

Absolutely what Thymox said.

The thing is, you need to know what to "chmod" and "chown". As for your joystick, I hope you have good luck. For your soundcard:

chmod 777 /dev/dsp
chmod 777 /dev/mixer
chmod 777 /dev/audio
chmod 777 /dev/sequencer

As for 777, well that's up to you. I don't really need lots of security on my audio devices, so I allow everyone permission to use them as they please. You might be better off with something like 755 as your chmod value.

Cool