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Firstly the media player issue. Which player are you using?
While I know this list for GUI users, I still would argue if you spend the time
to read about it mplayer is best. mplayer is a command line player, but there
may be some gnome GUI front end for it (I don't know, but mplayer is very
popular so some one might have). I will give some basic instructions for mplayer
usage as a command line app, but you really should read the docs for the full
detail.
Simply to play a file with all defaults, just
issue:
mplayer filename
at a command prompt (where filename is the file to play. In
fact filename can be a URL, or one of the mplayer device names eg. dvd:// for
dvd, or you can specify chapters in dvd's with something like dvd://2 for second
chapter (see docs for exact detail)).
You can specify a particular output type and device with the
-ao option. To use the ALSA sound drivers (I won't explain ALSA now, just to say
that this is preferable and the current main driver set in the kernel) you would
issue the command
mplayer -ao alsa filename
where filename is still the file you want to play. As another
example you can dump the output to a file with
mplayer -ao pcm filename
May seem pointless if you are playing a file, but its a way to
record an internet stream. The output drivers have options, but this is more
advanced than I want to discuss now, and the docs do mention this (and the help
options).
For video output, you have an output option which is -vo. This
is very much like -ao but you need to specify a video driver to use, such as
below
mplayer -vo vesa dvd://
should show the dvd on the screen (vesa should work in most
cases, but it may upset other graphic components of Linux, so other drivers such
as fbdev may be better to use, it depends on your system what is best to
use).
There are interactive controls also for mplayer for things
like pause, forwards, backwards, etc. There really is too much to document here,
so read the docs for mplayer and if you ask a more specific question, eg.
how to get real audio format support working in mplayer, I will try
and answer it.
You may need to get mplayer, in a debian based system, a
command such as
aptitude install mplayer
should get it (you may need to get the right permissions to
run aptitude, use the sudo command, so the command would now be
sudo aptitude install mplayer
)
Now for the other part, doing an update. What Linux distro are
you using? I probably would resort to the command line again (depending on the
version of Orca and gnome you are using, system management can be a problem, the
situation is improving, but as Orca is improving fast Distros don't always keep
up and provide the best version of Orca), as command line stuff has been around
longer the problems have been solved for some time (although I don't think the
command line has such difficulties in the first place). If you are using a
debian based system (eg. debian, ubuntu, grml (possibly, I don't know
how grml comes), etc) then you can enter
aptitude update
and
aptitude upgrade
to update your software (you may need to prefix both commands
with the sudo command, so they become
sudo aptitude update
and
sudo aptitude upgrade
if you get permission errors). For other distro types, you
will probably need other commands, either let us know what you are using and
some one hopefully can say, or refer to that distros docs.
From
Michael Whapples
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