some general gentoo questions

[GarrettW]

first of all, a shout-out to nox for being a linux geek. here's something to keep you busy.

i have a successful manual build of gentoo running on my desktop. but i don't use it much because i either don't know how to do certain things or i need certain programs, etc. to allow me to do everything i do in windows.

so mainly what i do is web development, listen to music, use my tv/fm tuner card and play games. plus i share my usb laser printer with the rest of my house.
now i know that gaming can be somewhat of an issue so forget about that one.
i know that linux has correctly detected my tuner, and i'm pretty sure v4l is in my USE flags (is that the right one?), so what do i need to use it?
I do have samba installed, so how do i share my printer?
...
actually i think what i need is a gui for the portage tree. how could i get that?
(by the way, gnome is installed - what a pain that was via sneakernet!)

i have more to say, but no time, so i'll be back.

[GarrettW]

ok, i'm back.

so what are some good media players for linux?

and lastly, any other suggestions (for anything) to help me along?

[mikeyp]

Right now I dont have any answers for your original questions. But I can help you with your second post about media players.


Music:
XMMS (http://www.xmms.org)- A winamp clone. Very simple, gets the job done.

Banshee (http://www.banshee-project.org)- an iTunes like media player. You can share your music and find other iTunes shares with the corrct plugins.

Amarok (http://amarok.kde.org)- very advanced media player. Its slogan is "Rediscover Your Music". Amarok can fetch album art, interface with your iPod, look up artist information on Wikipedia, look up lyrics online, interface with Last.fmhttp://www.last.fm and tons of other things with plugins. Amarok is my personal favorite.

Video:
I have had tons of luck with Kaffeine (http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net). After I installed a few codecs it has played any media file that I have thrown at it.

[GarrettW]

well mikey, only thing is, i use gnome. but i'm looking for something similar to amarok i guess.
and you say xmms is a winamp clone and simple in the same sentence. i use winamp myself, and it is anything but simple. it has features running out its ears.

[mikeyp]

I use gnome also and am using Kaffeine and AmaroK.

When I called XMMS simple I meant that it can easily run on any desktop environment without any complicated configurations.

[GarrettW]

i see. well, i just read that xmms is being taken off the portage tree. so forget that. i'll probably do amarok then.

[nox-Hand]

AmaroK is a great media player if you want all the features :)

Sorry for being late, I must have blundered since I didn't notice this thread :(

I use mpd but that's nothing you should look into as that's a daemon (don't even look into it, mate ;))

I suggest amaroK or xmms though xmms is so old it's been taken out of portage :/

You can install amaroK by doing this in command line:

# su
<enter password to become root>
# emerge -a amarok

and after a good long emerge you'll have it :)




A gui for portage/emerge is bad :( Most don't work as well as they should so I suggest just looking at http://packages.gentoo.org to search for packages and then emerge them :)

A complete web editor would be... nvu or bluefish. Install as root (su in command line terminal) by writing:

# emerge -a nvu
# emerge -a bluefish

nvu is more complete I think but I have used neither.



For printing I think you should look at this:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_print_winserver :)

I could do the whole manually telling you how to make your tuner card work, but assuming you made your own kernel, read this guide :)

http://gentoo-wiki.com/TV_tuner_card

If you used genkernel, I suggest emerging tvtime:

# emerge -a tvtime

and then using the troubleshooting in that article mentioned above to make it work. Start tvtime from a terminal so you can see all errors :)




I think I got it all, but poke me for all I might have missed. I am late for class so no time to re-read :(


You can always try to catch me on mail or gTalk (google Talk) or MSN. My MSN is john AT nox-hand.com and my mail is the same. My gTalk is nox.hand AT gmail.com



Will look in this thread as soon as I see a reply (subscribed :) )


Good luck!

[mdkaneda55]

i too use Gnome and i prefer using "Exaile Music Player" which is written in Python and GTK++, which makes it much faster than Amarok, although i do like Amarok. Exaile has most of the features of Amarok and is fast and stable. As for Web Development, NVU is too basic. i use Dreamweaver 8, it runs flawlessly with Wine. & as for the printer / tuner card, you'll have to go thru the guides and write your configs n such, its a learning experience, but achieving a microsoft-less desktop that is fully featured is very possible =).