Friday, February 26, 2010

Debian 5.0 Lenny

I moved over from Ubuntu 9.04 to Debian 5.0 recently. It was not because I did not like Ubuntu. I think Ubuntu is simply great and it has made Linux as user friendly as Windows. But I faced problems in compiling and installing some scientific packages. Hence, I had to move over to Debian. Moreover, I had been using Debian for a long time (nearly 4 years) before switching to Ubuntu. I am quite happy to be back to Debian. The current version 5.0 is certainly better than its predecessors. GUI functions are more stable. I have all the ingredients necessary for my work. I really don't worry about having latest packages as long as the current package is stable and it works. On this aspect, I faced trouble with Ubuntu sometimes. I am planning keep updating my readers about the problems I faced with Debian 5.0 and how to get around them.

Today, I would talk about the problem of VLC player not showing the video. It happened because of debian-multimedia repository. It upgraded some codes and vlc player stopped displaying video. The solution is to remove the debian-multimedia repository from /etc/apt/sources.list and then do the following :

$ sudo apt-get update
$ apt-get remove  ffmpeg libavcodec51 libavdevice52 libavformat52 libavutil49 libpostproc51 libswscale0
$ apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec51 libavdevice52 libavformat52 libavutil49 libpostproc51 libswscale0



$ apt-get install vlc


After this, your VLC player should work normally. It worked for me.



2 comments:

awhan said...

as far as i know vlc did not depend on other codecs ... may be i should find out more ... by the way i always vowed that as soon as my work got over i would not be a clerk who merely tries to get things done.. let me elaborate a bit... u know i was a fedora guy but when my hard disk crashed and the pc would not install fedora i had to start with ubuntu ... i have faced many such problems and always i promised not to waste my time investing the root cause of the problem and solving them as phd was more important than anything else. i always delegated such tasks for later... but i see that even u donot have time to try and solve the problems rather than giving up the OS altogether... perhaps it is the curse of all working professionals that we will never have time to be real hackers

Swagat said...
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