[nzlug] Xine on Fedora 8: does it work for anyone?

[Patrick Connolly]

Somewhere about Sat, 03-May-2008 at 01:30PM +1200 (give or take), Nevyn wrote:

|> On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Patrick Connolly
|> <tuxkid at slingshot.co.nz> wrote:

[....]

|> Hi Patrick,
|> 
|> You can drivers here:
|> http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html

No X1200 Series there.  Is there any danger using the X1300 one?  The
FAQ refers to the oldest being a Radeon 8500.  Nothing tells me
whether X1200 is older or not.

I have an Nvidia 7200 Series card which is "certified for Vista".  Am
I likely to have more or fewer problems getting that to work?

|> 
|> The gist of it is that the drivers, although free, aren't Free. Thus,
|> they can't be included in the base installation. I think a distro
|> tried to include Nvidia drivers a couple of years in their base
|> distribution and GNU got promptly snippy and put a stop to it.
|> 
|> The way around it seems to be to make the user fully aware of the
|> nature of the drivers. That they aren't considered Free. GNU seems
|> quite happy with this approach. I can't speak for Fedora though. I
|> have no idea how they normally do it.

I know RedHat is very purist about it, but I thought if I used the
Livna repository, I'd have it all covered.  There are dire warnings
about mixing repos, but it looks as though Livna doesn't have
everything necessary.  I used information from here:

http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f8-tips.php

It recommended installing a xine-skins rpm, but when I try that, I get
a message saying there's no such package.  I'd have thought that would
have had only cosmetic effects on xine.  The basic skin is fine by me,
so I didn't get too upset about it.  Did I misread something?

I thought I got the general gist, but I can't understand why kaffeine
doesn't have any problem.  I know it's a more basic player (though
it's pretty good), so does it mean that fancier stuff is needed for
that cool way Xine can zoom to any intermediate degree (instead of
just doubling or halving)?

TIA

-- 
   ___     Patrick Connolly      
 {~._.~}   
 _( Y )_          Good judgment comes from experience 
(:_~*~_:)         Experience comes from bad judgment    
 (_)-(_)