Distilled Futility.
Dec. 29th, 2008 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupOy, the saga of the VLC continues. I decided yesterday to bite the bull by the horns (or however that goes) and install the experimental version of VLC from the Debian experimental repository. I spent a fair amount of time with the apt-get man pages to find out how to ask what the effects of an install would be. (BTW, apt-get and every other similar installer I've ever used suck at being able to tell you about the overall consequences of something -- that needs to be fixed. Generally, they suck at doing queries.)
So, after convincing myself that the set of files to be installed/upgraded was small and seemed rather insignifigant, I went for it. Everything worked fine too. Suddenly I had video again. Then I made the mistake of logging out and trying to log back in. KDE froze somewhere during init.
KDE never produced anything in the way of an error message and I couldn't find any way to use PS to figure out where it was hanging/crashing/looping whatever. I never did figure it out. It was at this point that I realized one major problem -- apt-get doesn't have an undo. I could remove the installed VLC, but I couldn't downgrade the four libraries that it had upgraded to do the installation. I couldn't even find a way to ASK what four libraries had been upgraded by the change.
After having spent all afternoon googling for methods to diagnose a hung KDE and finding nothing usefull, I decided to re-install gnome, which I did. Then, at least, I could log into a graphical shell.
After logging into gnome, I managed to do a smart upgrade of KDE so as to fix my loggin-in problem. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the results were, but I now suspect that certain portions of my KDE are sid, while most are still lenny. Whatever, my KDE now works again although I found a few quirks I had to fix (such as discovering that VirtualBox had been removed and needed to be installed again.)
After all that, you know what I discovered? The latest version of VLC has major functionality removed because of ongoing known bugs that no one has fixed. So, yes, the seek bar now works, but the utiltity is now much more difficult to use. :-/
What's more, something seems to have changed in my USB setup. Now when I plug in an external NTFS drive via a USB drive rack, I don't automatically have write access to it. Before the 'upgrade', I did. Actually, this now seems to be a general problem with all NTFS mounts which I'll look into today. Hopefully its no big deal to fix.
So, after convincing myself that the set of files to be installed/upgraded was small and seemed rather insignifigant, I went for it. Everything worked fine too. Suddenly I had video again. Then I made the mistake of logging out and trying to log back in. KDE froze somewhere during init.
KDE never produced anything in the way of an error message and I couldn't find any way to use PS to figure out where it was hanging/crashing/looping whatever. I never did figure it out. It was at this point that I realized one major problem -- apt-get doesn't have an undo. I could remove the installed VLC, but I couldn't downgrade the four libraries that it had upgraded to do the installation. I couldn't even find a way to ASK what four libraries had been upgraded by the change.
After having spent all afternoon googling for methods to diagnose a hung KDE and finding nothing usefull, I decided to re-install gnome, which I did. Then, at least, I could log into a graphical shell.
After logging into gnome, I managed to do a smart upgrade of KDE so as to fix my loggin-in problem. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the results were, but I now suspect that certain portions of my KDE are sid, while most are still lenny. Whatever, my KDE now works again although I found a few quirks I had to fix (such as discovering that VirtualBox had been removed and needed to be installed again.)
After all that, you know what I discovered? The latest version of VLC has major functionality removed because of ongoing known bugs that no one has fixed. So, yes, the seek bar now works, but the utiltity is now much more difficult to use. :-/
What's more, something seems to have changed in my USB setup. Now when I plug in an external NTFS drive via a USB drive rack, I don't automatically have write access to it. Before the 'upgrade', I did. Actually, this now seems to be a general problem with all NTFS mounts which I'll look into today. Hopefully its no big deal to fix.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-29 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-29 09:28 pm (UTC)a) Plays most things without trouble.
b) Has a simple-to-use interface
c) Doesn't demand I set up some sort of media library
d) Has on-the-fly controls for gamma, contrast, etc.
That last one is the kicker. So far only VLC seems to do that. Please let me know if I'm wrong.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 08:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-29 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-29 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-29 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 02:13 am (UTC)Granted that's more than 2 years ago; I've since moved onto OSX...
no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 08:21 am (UTC)ttyl
no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 07:39 pm (UTC)In any case, slackware is far to much work for someone still as new to Linux as I am right now...