Monday, October 25, 2010

Ubuntu Karmic Koala and VLC

It's been some time since I last posted here .. nothing happened to me that's interesting for a broader audience, it seems ... Well, I found something.

On my notebook, I am forced to use nothing more current than ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.04), because KMS+old intel graphics doesn't really work - see more below. Luckily, many of the packages are still being updated (including firefox), but one is missing for me ... a current version of vlc aka video lan client. So, I had to compile it. Only took about 30mins of CPU time ;)

There are no packages on launchpad for vlc/karmic, so I offer them for download, if anyone is interested. This is not an apt repository, but just a folder with .deb files. I compiled them from the lucid sources from Ferramosca Roberto's LffL VLC

To install, download the files from http://www.tecbites.de/ubuntu/karmic/vlc, and use the following to install:

sudo dpkg -i libmtp8_1.0.2-1ubuntu1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i vlc_1.1.4.1-1~lffl~lucid~ppa1_i386.deb \
 vlc-data_1.1.4.1-1~lffl~lucid~ppa1_all.deb \
 libvlc5_1.1.4.1-1~lffl~lucid~ppa1_i386.deb \
 libvlccore4_1.1.4.1-1~lffl~lucid~ppa1_i386.deb \
 vlc-nox_1.1.4.1-1~lffl~lucid~ppa1_i386.deb
These are the packages you need, at least - some of the plugins may be handy, the -dev packages you probably won't need.
Oh, they are called lucid because I compiled them from the ppa launchpad lucid dsc sources ... I should fix this, and the maintainer name also ;)


Just for information - my experiences with ubuntu, old intel graphics (82852/855GM), kernel based mode setting (KMS) and XVideo acceleration were quite free of successes.
Depending on the distribution and the current update state,
* KMS+XVideo is not supported (and not planned to be supported, I believe)
* nomodeset+XVideo either doesn't work, or crashes the X11 server
My experiences with opensuse were similar, so, it appears to be something the old hardware has to live with (IBM Thinkpad X40).

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