Opensuse 10.3,mplayer,gcc,Wine..........

Opensuse 10.3,mplayer,gcc,Wine..........

The four words that has dominated my desktop for the past week. It all started with my longing for yet another stint with a linux O.S for my desktop. I actually started with that Kubuntu 8.04 hardy kde4 which i heard was cooool, and i found out soon when i installed it, it looked cool (kde 4), everything seemed fine...... wvdial configured for airtel made me feel at home.....

The start of problems however was when i rebooted for the first time, to my surprise........i found no windows boot option in GRUB which was not cool at all....... found out later that it is one of the most reported bugs on HARDY........ i guess that is a tit for tat....... aka windows style...... Apun ke Ilake mein koin doosra O.S nahi chalegaaaaaa.........

That was only the tip, i found out my Taskbar for kubuntu 8.04 missing or rather vanished which looked soooo good last time i logged ( that was also the first time)....... i just couldn't take that and pulled out an Opensuse 10.3 installation cd and started the process...... hoping that my Windows boot will be restored and started looking for reasons to believe that Opensuse 10.3 was actually better than Kubuntu, and also was convinced sooon that it was better. looked and felt better even though it was kde 3.5. Also had firefox preinstalled, not so in the case of Kubuntu.

the next thing i got hooked to was adding a repo.... couldn't do that....... the reason was that i tried;
apt-cdrom add
which i found out soon wont work on opensuse because it had Yum instead of apt and also soon found out that i didn't have Yum installed on my system...... hope started fading here too...... So copied the whole repo into the /home/hisam directory and tried to compile the source files from there...... one at a time....... started with my favourite mplayer...... which lead to another discovery...... that i didnt have the gcc compiler which obviously was required to compile source files....... kept a download for a 23 mb gcc...........src.rpm file through my very slow but very kind airtel gprs........ gave a "shutdown -r 120"...... and then i dozed....... found out in the morning that the down was a Thumbs up....... tried to install it;

rpm -hiv gcc.......src.rpm

then got a spec file at /usr/src/packages/SPECS

rpmbuild -ba gcc33.spec

which lead to the below failure.....

error: Failed build dependencies:
flex is needed by gcc33-3.3.3-42.1.i586
bison is needed by gcc33-3.3.3-42.1.i586
gettext-devel is needed by gcc33-3.3.3-42.1.i586
zlib-devel is needed by gcc33-3.3.3-42.1.i586


That meant i had to install flex,biso,gettext-devel,zlib-devel first inorder to install gcc which in turn was required to compile any source files...... Kismat Konnection i guess.
And i was also told that to install flex,biso,gettext-devel,zlib-devel i may require other dependent files....... How cool na ??

And in the meanwhile i found out that my Windows boot was not restored.....

uffffffffff

But one certain upside to all this is my stumbling upon Wine, na not that wine, this one is a software for linux which can run windows Api applications, like .exe files right from your linux distro. I stumbled on this when i did an rpm search for flex,bison......... I downed that rpm..... and thank god i was not asked for any other dependent files to install wine, Yast did it Windows style for me........

And soon had my Firefox 3,picasa and media player classic running on my linux O.S....... that was treat for my eyes......


So i have decided that i will be repairing using an xp cd which will bring the Windows back, and then againg doing a tweak with Opensuse installation cd..... to get back both in tandem. That will work i guess.

The only consolation that i have is Wine, the cool Linux software that is. ;-)