Gentoo is an OS that lets you install anything you want which is great, but I ran across a problem with this today because of the lack of a description on an xmms pluggin. Here is a link to a forum that has a good description of the problem.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&postid=1603918#post1603918 My problem was that I've never installed xmms and have it NOT be able to play .pls files on the web before. Therefore I had NO CLUE which pluggin gave me this support. I also found that there was no webpage anywhere that even describes what mpg123 does. Since this pluggin is installed by default on just about every mainstream distro known to man, there were NO reports of the error that I was getting. The error report said I was missing a pluggin, but it didnt say which, and therefore I was left out in the cold to try to find the right one. So, I started looking through the portage files with anything that had xmms in the descrpition/name and I came up with nothing. I then resorted to looking on google for my error and I got SUPER lucky with 1 single hit, and had it not been for this guys post just 2 weeks ago, I'd have been racking my head with this problem for weeks. Long story short, the xmms-mp123 plugin description needs to be updated to something other than "Xmms Plugin: xmms-mpg123". Thats a pretty useless description if you ask me. I noticed that almost all of the xmms plugins were the same way except a few. Most dont need a description since the filenames pretty much give it away, but this one was an exception. mpg123 has nothing to do with .pls playlist files. I consider this a minor Gentoo flaw than anything else. I would have never figured this out on my own in a million years. Who would have thought that adding a file called mpg123 would allow you to play .pls files? Anyone? Am I just plain stupid or does this make any sense at all? It was playing mp3's just fine that I had on my HD, but it wouldnt play the .pls files until I installed the mpg123 plugin. I dont know who the maintainer for this plugin is (I didnt want to send out 10 emails to the people in the changelog either) so here I am. BTW, Gentoo is by far the best Linux distro once it's installed. Getting it installed would be a nightmare for any new linux user, but after that, it's got everything you could imagine in the portage files which is a real nice feature. I didnt think that having porthole being marked as masked was very good though. It's a great app for searching the portage dir without having to be online or use command line. I'm still trying to figure out easier ways to unmask things. Right now, the syntax for it is horrid. Other than that, I'm quite happy with my conversion from Mandrake to Gentoo experience. I've been using linux now for about 9 years (the last 6 months of that as my desktop, the rest as a server platform). I see Linux being a viable desktop OS that has 30-40% of the market share in less than 4 years and from all the distro's I've tried, Gentoo has been the best Desktop viable linux simply because of portage compared to any of the other binary based pkg systems. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
