Today was my first induction into the stereotypical Linux “dependency hell” (a term meaning that every package you try to install has dependencies on yet another package you don't yet have). In my case, I decided to look into VLC from VideoLAN. The download provided contained about 85% of what was needed. I downloaded several packages from different places (two of note were Fresh RPMs and RPM Find, and got all unresolved dependencies down to 1 - “libxinerama.so.2”.

Upon further Googling, I found that this library is part of XFree86. This is where the “fun” began. XFree86 has gone not-free, so they don't have anything for you to download. No worries yet - a new organization called x.org has taken over development of the free version, so I'll go there and download it. Well, x.org is new, and they don't have any software available for download either - just documents about what they're going to do. Through my searching, I found that xinerama is an X add-on that supports multiple monitors. Although I only have one, this program just has to have it. After fruitlessly searching for hours, I gave up on VLC.

Okay, let's try MPlayer - it sounds like it could be fun. Got it installed, and got nowhere - seems /dev/dvd doesn't exist on my system. So, I create /dev/dvd/, unmount the DVD/CD-ROM drive, re-mount it under /dev/dvd/, and give it a shot. Now I get a message telling me there's no installed handler. -sigh- Next I tried xine - the site recommended that I download the source and compile it myself. That was interesting - at this point, I got so frustrated that I called it a night.

Not that today was all negative - I was able to send an e-mail, using addresses imported from Netscape on my other machine, to every member of my Sunday School class. In fact, I was so impressed with how easy Ximian Evolution is that I changed the setting on the mail account to delete the e-mail once it's pulled down. I haven't yet found a way to import my mail from Netscape, but that's a low priority. I also signed up for the WBEL Users mailing list, so I could keep up with what's going on with WBEL.