Okay, this is silly ...

[RoyGBiv]

I got an update to VLC awhile back. Thought nothing of it. Now, I'm seeing this.




A Santa hat? Really? Is there going to be another update after Christmas that gets rid of it?

[canetoad]

1. I have it too

and it pisses me off, as it means that I must have left Auto Updates turned on. Now I can't turn it off until the effing little red hat is gone. I wish people would keep their hands off my GUI.

[RoyGBiv]

3. No kidding ...

It completely ruined the show I was watching. I got all obsessed with this little friggin' hat.

Sheesh.

Well, at least I'm not the only one. :)

[Why Syzygy]

2. lol! nt

[RoyGBiv]

4. Oh, sure ...

Laugh. Laugh at my pain. I have a friggin' Santa hat on my desktop I can't get rid of!

What's next? Replace my disc activity light with Rudolph's nose? :)

[madokie]

5. I'm running mint 8 and love it

i would like to use vlc for my player, for everything. After installing it which of the players that come with mint 8 could I remove?

These are what I have on here now
Gnome mplayer
Movie player
mplayer media player
pulse audio device chooser, not sure I'm using anything here
rythmbox music player, this is like falling through a tangled spiderweb, and I've heard you complain about this one so I'd really like to get rid of it, if I can safely

As always thanks
Peace and have a great holiday season

About to forget, Internet radio, (kpig), an occasional cd and dvd and thats about all I'll be doing.

I guess I could do like I usually do and just start removing and replacing until I find the combination i like but I really like the way I've got mint set up this time and really don't want to start from scratch again if I don't have too.

[RoyGBiv]

6. Two answers ...

1) You can get rid of all of those. If you use vlc and like it, it's self-contained and does not have a dependency on any of those specifically.

2) Getting rid of pulseaudio means, basically, getting rid of your sound system. You'd have to replace it with something like OSS. This is a process. If pulseaudio is working for you, I'd keep it. The only reason to get rid of it is if it's causing you sound issues, which it does with some people's hardware. Because it is new, it exposes some flaws in older sound drivers, and there are some other things that can be twitchy. Again, if it's working, stick with it. You have to have a sound system, and pulseaudio is the current standard.

If it were me, I'd keep the basic mplayer. It's useful for a lot of things and is a dependency of several other packages, so even if you uninstall it, you may end up reinstalling it as a dependency with something else. For example, if you ever rip a DVD or edit video, you're going to be using mplayer as a backend. It's an extremely powerful program that does a lot more than the standard GUI indicates. (It's a command line program actually. There are several GUIs for it.) Also, I'm not sure what standard Mint does for an embedded (web browser) video player. The KDE version uses Dragon player, but standard Mint probably uses mplayer or some variant that relies on it. That said, vlc can be used for this as well, but I can't remember off the top of my head how to do it.

I'm not entirely sure what Gnome mplayer and Move player are, but I'm guessing they're front-ends for mplayer, i.e. GUIs for the mplayer program. You can probably dump them without a problem.

Hope you have a good holiday too. I'm off work for two weeks and plan on enjoying every second of it. When I get back, I go straight into the hell that is Spring registration, so I'm going to attempt to ignore that and just eat lots of pie. :)

[RoyGBiv]

7. P.S.

I understand you're trying to clean up your system, and that's cool. I just want to make sure this is clear.

It's not as much of an issue in Linux to have a bunch of software you rarely use on your system. For one thing, there's no registry to get overloaded. Also, the applications tend not to take up as much hard drive space. I, for example, have a massive amount of software installed ... five web browsers, half a dozen multimedia players, three DVD authoring applications, a couple of rippers, Gimp, Gwenview, Blender (which is huge), dozens of utilities, a bunch of games, things like Stellarium ... I could go on and on.

My /root directory, where all this is located, consumes about 8GB of space. That's all the apps and the OS itself.

The biggest annoyance with having too much software is that it clutters up your apps menu. I always got annoyed with SuSE 'cause the damn thing at one time installed, by default, four different calculators. I mean, c'mon. Seriously. How many calculators do I need?

Oh, and since I didn't mention it before, yes, kill rythmbox. It's one of the few Linux apps I actually hate. I use Amarok, which is okay, but its currently in heavy development (re-write of an older app from scratch) and so has some bugs. It'll be cool once it's more stable.

[madokie]

8. Its that breaking the habit thing

I know when I quit drinking and smoking cigarettes it was the habit of doing it that was the hardest to break not the addictions themselves, I had both of them whopped pretty quickly, adictions wise. Thats kind of where I am with linux and windows right now, trying to break the habits.

Thanks for the good advice

I hate to keep bothering you but will vlc take care of things if I purge rythmbox or do I have to use another program such as what you're currently using?

After this I'll try to leave you alone so you can enjoy your holidays and the rejuvenating time

[RoyGBiv]

9. You're not bothering me ...

I like discussing these things.

I was out all day. Sorry for the delayed response.

This may be one of those areas where my advice isn't quite as helpful because of the way I personally use these kinds of apps. That is, this may boil down to personal taste. As it advertises itself, rhythmbox is an iTunes-ish application, and the reason a lot of people use it or something like it is to catalog their music, organize podcasts, etc. I don't like it 'cause it has too much crap going on and is way too "busy" for me. I just use playlists I make myself, and I make those generally by adding files to a playlist in VLC and saving it or just opening a whole directory saving that as a playlist. Some people would probably think the way I do this is clunky, but it is more comfortable for me.

Anyway, VLC will play pretty much anything, and it can stream anything it can play, so, for that part of the functionality, yes, it can be used. It might take some tinkering to set it up. That said, what it can't do very well is podcasts, so, if you're using it for that, you might want something like rhythmbox.

Honestly, Amarok is a bit too busy for my tastes too, but I like it better for reasons I can't explain well. I don't use it for stuff I have saved locally. I think of it more like my Internet radio app. I have several streaming stations and podcast links saved in it, and when I want to use them, I just open it up and click on one. It's sorta like a glorified car radio with a lot of presets.

This may have been entirely unhelpful, but those are my meandering thoughts on the subject.

[pokerfan]

10. I am probably the only person in the linux world using Audacious

I like the winamp look.

[RoyGBiv]

11. Interesting ...

I'd never heard of it. I'll have to check it out. Thanks.

I always liked winamp. It was the first audio player that made sense to me.

[Gore1FL]

12. I don't use VLC.

It violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act