Watching Video Clips

Something that slightly annoys me is the inability to watch video clips, MP4s and the like, which seem to work on my desktops that run Arch. Maybe I have overlooked something. I will start by following the instructions on how to set up Arch Linux for dvd ripping. It can't hurt, and after all, it's only going to take up hard drive space, yes ?

Well, It may not have hurt, but it still doesn't work. Shades of Mr John Major .

OK then, I am getting an error message from the Totem Movie Player 2.22.2 using GStreamer 0.10.20 and GNOME telling me "The playback of this movie requires a H.264 MPEG-4 AAC decoder plugin which is not installed". The desktop that does play it has the totem-xine package so let's try a little more jiggery and pokery ...

A swift "sudo pacman -S totem-xine" removes the Gstreamer version, loads the Xine version, and ... and ...

And PRESTO it works (!)

Wader and Wader-gtk

OK then, this is it. Time to confront the elephant in the room.

Pivotal to what I want to do with the webbook is the mechanism by which the thing can establish a connection to the big bad world via a broadband usb dongle. In my case an orange Icon-225 broadband usb dongle but we live in hope of it working with others as well.

The ubuntu build came with a prebuilt wader and wader-gtk package from warp networks. I am going to have to build it from the ground up and it probably isn't going to be easy.

Edit September 22nd.

Well this is where it gets tough. The source code for the wader package seems to have been stored here on "launchpad" where I find a total of six "packages" listed in alphabetical order

• dbus-python-0.82.-1ubuntu2~ppa1
• hso-1.3.1
• hsolink-1.0.46.0-2
• pydoctor-0.2.0+svn56371-1
• usbmodeswitch=0.9.4.1
• wader-0.2.2-1

As this has all been built for debian / ubuntu I am guessing I will have to start over pretty much from the beginning. From a brief scrutiny of the packages my first assessment is as follows :-

• The dbus-python and pydoctor packages are there to extend python to cater for operation of the wader utiluty.
• hso is a kernel module permitting operation of the high speed g3 modem. This is going to be the fun part of the setup, I can tell (!)
• hsolink is a utility that permits the IP setup of the G3 modem
• usbmodeswitch is a utility that flicks the ZeroCD usb 3G stick from CD to modem.
• And wader is the python utility that does the rest.
  

OpenOffice Progress

Again this all looks too easy. As per the Arch Wiki

• sudo pacman -S jre openoffice-base

Wi-Fi

The ubuntu software included a network tool that worked a little like wifi-radar.

So it seems the obvious thing to do is try ...

• su
• pacman -S wifi-radar
• wifi-radar

And guess what. It WORKED. All I did was run the tool, it picked up on the existence of the ipw2200 chips right away, and found my wireless router. All I had to do was 'configure' things with the right mode (managed), channel (auto) and wep key and off it went and came right back with an IP address. I know it is supposed to do what it says on the tin. However it is still nice when it does.

OK I don't use wpa here so I cannot speak for that.

This is all getting to be too easy.

GNOME Progress

More surprises

It works. Almost out of the box. I got caught out by stupidly enabling gdm before i had added a non-privileged user, so I had to recover by loading a 'knoppix live CD' and using it to mount, and then edit, the /etc/rc,conf to add a "!" before gdm in the daemons line. A hint: if you want to run a knoppix livecd, you CAN, but specify "fb800x600" in the boot line or the framebugger exceeds the screen size and you can't see the bottom lines when running 'vi'

Further GNOME amendments will be added to this if need be later

X-Windows Progress

I'm quite surprised really.

The X Windows xorg package installed and ran with minimal effort. OK the screen and video driver are the vesa standard, which is rubbish really, but it will do until I get the big stuff out of the way and I'll come back to the little things afterwards.

Putting this post on the site as a marker, I will add things later !

Where next ?

A good question (!)

Here is the wishlist I will be less than happy if I do not succeed in geting running. I may be back to edit this in good time (!)

• X Windows (that may be fun with the webbooks 1024x600 screen)
• GNOME (see comment above)
• Wireless Networking (with wifi-radar)
• OpenOffice
• Email, Web, Pidgin
  
• Alsa Sound
• Some means to play youtube videos and the like
  
• Some means to run my webcam
• A port of the wader-gtk utility to permit the webbook to once again connect me to the mobile internet !

I am hoping the work I have to do to achieve this is little more, in most cases, than the work already documented to such high standards in the Arch Wiki. If so, the next few entries will be sparse. SOMEHOW though I don't think that is going to happen easily.

Well, I started off by reading the Official Arch Linux Install Guide and the first thing I thought I ought to install above and beyond the norm was abs. With that out of the way I barnstormed on to install Xorg.

Installing the basic Xorg system needed no more than the slavish following of the details in the Arch Wiki and an edit in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file created by hwd. I removed all the "modelines" and set a single screen size, 1024x600, for the one resolution I wanted, and I deleted all the rest.

One thing that must be done before you load and auto-start gdm is the setting up of a non privileged user account otherwise you enter an endless loop where your attempts to log in as 'root' are blocked because by default gdm is configured to ban root login. It's a pity the arch docs don't bother warning you of this, one day I will get caught out by it (!)

Oh yeah, before I forget. In the arch wiki for gnome is a near-throwaway comment about adding "portmap, fam and hal" to the daemons line in /etc/rc.conf. Don't forget to do it !