went to slacky.eu -- beautiful thing ,,, anyway - downloaded mplayer.tgz and when i un-tared it (twice) i never got the file -- mplayer-1.0rc2try1-i686-1sl.tgz in my ~ folder without the .tgz on the end ....
what do i run installpkg on?
thanks ,,,,
will ck back after work !!!
Live ON ...

tgz are usually binary packages, they don't usually include the original tarball. Have you tried just using installpkg to install it?

installpkg mplayer.tgz

mplayer does not end in .tgz ---- tried it anyway got corrected -- i have already untared this ---- tar -xvzf and everything went to /usr/bin ... in the ~ ..... there is only ~/usr ... ~/etc .... and ~/install .... looked in the man install page included with the .tgz and it did not help .... this one never left me a file to run installpkg on ... mplayer is in ~/etc but when i run the above command i get "mplayer does not end in .tgz" .... tried install too .... but i don't get how to parse it ... install -T mplayer ~/mplayer ... get install: omitting directory `mplayer .... i don't know how to use install ....
confused .....
please help !!!!

If you have slackware and downloaded a .tgz package, you will install that as root w/ installpkg package.tgz. Trickykid was correct.

If you get a package that ends in tar.gz, you can unpack it with tar xvzf file.tar.gz.

If you cet a package that ends with tar.bz2, you can unpack it with tar xvjf file.tar.bz2.

When you are unpacking you almost always go into the newly extracted directory and run ./configure, then make, and then su to root and make install. Many people have to look at the options of ./configure with ./configure --help first, and then they configure with extra options.

You might want to just get mplayer form the site, so you can get all the codecs, too. Here's the latest mplayer: http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/rel...1.0rc2.tar.bz2

Here's the codecs necessary to watch most content: http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/rel...071007.tar.bz2

I put all of my codecs in /usr/local/lib/codecs/ . I think that's where they are supposed to go for mplayer to find them, but the mplayer website has more thorough docs on this.

I hope you get mplayer working, because you'll love your computer and linux more once you do! I use mplayer for everything, including youtube, and couldn't be happier.

sorry but i'm just lost with this:

there are three files that need to be installed -
doinst.sh slack-desc slack-required

when i run make on them, i get "make: Nothing to be done for `doinst.sh'"
when i run install, i use install -d, i get "install: cannot create directory `doinst.sh': File exists"
and make -d install, i get "Must remake target `install'.
make: *** No rule to make target `install'. Stop."

the directory the original .tgz file created was /usr/doc/mplayer
it also created /usr /etc and /install on the Desktop ....

read make --help and install --help ,, but ./configure or cofigure --help is a bad or unrecognized name

REALLY LOST NOW .....

Delete the files and folders you have downloaded. Go back to the site and redownload the mplayer package. Then, without untarring the package, run installpkg mplayer<whatever it is>.tgz as root. This will install mplayer for you.

A tgz file that was packaged for Slackware is the compiled binaries for that program. Think of tgz as an RPM, it's already gone through the configure, make and make install steps for you on a particular architecture.

good advice ....
overlooked the most important step ....
both posts are correct ... the only thing is when i run installpkg on the <whatever>.tgz as su it installs perfectly,,,, but perfectly where???
can't find hide nor hair of that mplayer now .....
looked in the root Desktop and ~ user desktop so i will look at the link that was posted earlier when i get off work tomorrow evening ... it is something simple i am sure i.e. /urs/bin/mplayer ....
do you have any hints about how to make a desktop icon for the mplayer file once i have found it????
thanks everyone for your kind advice ....

Run the command On my system, it returns.

If you need a gui, check the multimedia section of the KDE menu, if it's not there, try running "gmplayer" from the command line.

Or run updatedb and then do a "locate mplayer"

And if the mplayer command can be ran from the command line, you can just type mplayer video.avi. If you use a file manager to browse through your movie collection graphically, you can set it to "open" your videos with mplayer. You shouldn't need to type the full /path/to/mplayer .

Not to sure how to put an icon on your desktop, though, but if you figure it out you would want it to be an icon for gmplayer.



Random Mplayer Thought: did you know you can make animated gifs with mplayer, too?
mplayer -vo gif89a video.avi

It will make a file called out.gif, and you can open it with the gimp to resize it (to make an animated avatar, for instance). And it's kind of weird, but you can even play the animated gif with mplayer.

thanks ....
mplayer was in /usr/bin ,,,,, changed video preferences in Firefox to use /usr/lib/mplayer ,,
will see what happens when i have a video sent to me to play ....
another thing though ,,,
i downloaded frozen-bubble for my wife and daughter ...
it was a .tgz file as well,,, expanded and installed fine .... went also to /usr/bin but to /usr/bin/frozen-bubble .... when i use beagle to search it out i found a file fb-server as the executable .... but when i click on it it doesn't run ..... the program resides in /usr/bin as well as /usr/bin/frozen-bubble as a small Perl program ....
any ideas?

one other thing ,,, when i try to play a .wma file off the desktop it still pulls up gxine ...
how do i change the preferences for how a file or file type pull up a particular player ...
(other than firefox) .... is it set in Konqueror? as the file manager mentioned above ... although i never use my file manager to search video files ,,, well i guess i do ,,,, not directly ,,, anyway i will ck that one ...
and when i type mplayer in /usr/bin i get a dependeceny error looking for "libjack.so.0" ... looked for the file (have already downloaded the codecs "all-20071007-noarch-1sal.tgz") from Slacky.eu ,,, an italian site i presume as i cannot read any descriptions only package names ....so any ideas about this ,,, and probably others to follow ,,, dependencies for mplayer ..
thanks again ....

ok ....

back p-its sunday,,, when i try to click on any .wma files with konqueror, or try to run the executable - mplayer - in ~usr/bin ,,,, i get this message .....

"mplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libjack.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" ......

i believe i downloaded all the correct codecs ,,, listed as file ........

"all-20071007-noarch-1sal.tgz"

but something is missing ..... any ideas ??????

ckd out mplayer in ~/usr/bin and it is about 9MB large and has root as owner and group ...

I'd guess you're missing libjack . You can get the source for it here. LinuxPackages.net has a package for it, should you want to use that.