Thursday, February 28, 2008

Installing a Few little Audio and Graphics Apps

GRAPHICS
Sometimes, it might be nice to view images and/or take screenshots. Without bloating the system, feh and scrot from LinuxBrit worked for me.
There is also the X11R6 builtin xwd which can capture the screen, but the xwd format doesn't seem to be very portable.
The install order which covered the dependencies was:
giflib-4.1.6
imlib2-1.2.2
giblib-1.2.4
feh-1.3.4
scrot-0.8

AUDIO
Alsa and xmms came to mind.
I had previously installed alsa-lib-1.0.13
I installed in this order:
alsa-utils-1.0.13
xmms-1.2.10
alsa-plugins-1.0.13

Once again the configurations mystified me.
After searching, I found this note entitled "ALSA_MYSTERY":
add user to audio group
add user to cdrom group

I think I rebooted after installing alsa-utils.
I ran alsamixer and was able to set the Master volume.
I ran speaker-test and could hear the generated noise.

After installing xmms and alsa-plugins, I tried running xmms.
I clicked on as many things as I could find, but nothing seemed
to get it to play a cd or to make any sound.
It seems like rebooting again sorted something out so that
the xfce4-mixer was able to control the volume of speaker-test.
Oh well, someday I might understand this a little more.

With xmms running, I right-clicked clicked somewhere
and got a menu.
I chose Options->Preferences.
I later learned that CTRL-P also opens the preferences menu.
I clicked on CD Audio Player 1.2.10 (libcdaudio.so)
and clicked the button marked Configure.
There it is! The device tab that is obscurely mentioned
in the documentation.
It is important to make sure the Device is truly the device
for your cd player.
I set it to /dev/hdd which I am sure is my cd player.
One way to find this out is to look in /var/log/sys.log and
see which device matches the description of the cd player.
You can't necessarily trust a link called /dev/cdrom.
I also set the Play Mode to Digital Audio Extraction.

In the tab marked CD Info
I checked the box marked Use CDDB.
With a CD in the drive the play button started to work.

1 Comments:

Blogger linux fan said...

Apparently linuxbrit no longer maintains those great programs and they are not at the main page. However, they are still available at downloads

January 4, 2010 at 7:28 PM  

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