I am trying to find an RPM for Mplayer. Every time I think I have found one, the link opens a RealPlayer window. I am just wondering where I can find a download for it.

Hi Colin, You can find what you are looking for at freshrpms.net there are dependendinces with Mplayer. My advise is to download APT for RH9 from there then run apt-get update then apt-get check then apt-get install synaptic. Then you will have a GUI front end for apt. Or you could just do apt-get install mplayer without synaptic. But you do have to update the apt repository first thing. I would go ahead and get xine while you are at it. You will need both in order to play DVDs and other vidio streams. Take care Ron

I really could never understand why you people can't just compile the thing yourself, with your own compile-time flags. RPM sucks, especially having different a "-devel" package for each program, and not to mention those irritating dependencies which you have already install from source (and they might not work if you force the install coz they are a different version than what the package was compiled against). Compiling MPlayer took about 2 minutes on my system.

rpm is terriffic, easy to use and supplies an incredible amount of infomation. For example, if i run "rpm -qa|grep -i mplay", it displays mplayer-tools-0.92-1 mplayer-0.92-1 mplayer-codecs-win32-qt-6.0-1 mplayer-common-0.92-1 so i know what release I am using and the codec set. Want to know what mplayer-tools-0.92-1 is? rpm -qi mplayer-tools-0.92-1 Various optional tools for use with MPlayer. Currently included: * mplayer_subfont - a tool for creating OSD fonts There are occasional "problems" with rpm, but these are often correct such as missing dependancies or wrong versions of installed software. Great tool !

Hey, not everyone knows how to read the README or INSTALL to follow the instructions to build it (remember the guy asking about having lilo boot into text instead of GUI and when I told him to read the manpage, he came back and said that if I didn't know the answer, I should keep quiet--something close to that)!!! And when some try to build it, they would find out that they can't because they didn't install the compiler, GCC, or the devepment packages... And others don't care about building it; they just want to download , install, and use it right away. Therefore, rpm, apt-get, or even yum is a nice little utility for those kind of people. Of course, if you want to build everything from source, then go right ahead. I've done both. taurus

The guy couldnt even find an RPM. Do you really think he can compile from source? I do it all the time on my slack box. Otherwise you just installpkg blahblah and then blah blah doesnt work because of some dependincy issue. I thought that I offered him the best and easiest solution to his problem. I compiled k3b and blender as well as some other apps from source but for some people it just wont happen. Take Care Ron

rpms may be useful if one package isn't all divided up. Now look at this: mplayer-tools-0.92-1 mplayer-0.92-1 mplayer-common-0.92-1 I'm sure the first two are dependent on the last. Disk space is cheap these days, you could just install an "mplayer-0.92-1" and be done with it. I've been using Linux systems for many years now but I never could understand the use of having different packages for "common", "tools", "devel" etc. In my view the best way to manage packages are to write a script which remembers the locations of copied files in a text file (so you can remove them later), and to just compile everything from source, all in /usr (and don't use rpm at all). This is how it was intended to be by the authors, and also, a source tarball is the first file which is released (when a new release takes place).