Hello everybody! It's me again...

My pegasos/gentto system getting close to a final shape.
Right now I met two problems, I cannot solve myself:

a- I'm using mplayer to watch dvd movies. But the playback is quiet 'jumpy'. Is there a way to speed up things? (Got a G4 Pegasos)

b- I can listen to cd when i start the cd player (like grip) as root. Otherwise the player says that unable to initialize cdrom (/mnt/cdrom)
I added the user to all possible group according to gentto handbook; in fstab cdrom has user option.

Any idea?

rogerius,
What video driver are you using in MPlayer? I found that the OpenGL drivers don't work very well, especially in full screen mode.
It sounds like a permission problem. Try 'ls -l /mnt' and make sure your permissions look like: "drwxr-xr-x." Can you read cdroms under your user account?

Have you set the altivec USE-flag in /etc/make.conf (prior to emerging mplayer)? If not, edit /etc/make.conf and add altivec to USE and emerge mplayer again. Run emerge mplayer -av to review which USE-flags you have enabled/disabled.
If you are lazy emerge profuse which is a nice GUI (ncurses, GTK, etc) for configuring USE-flags.
GRIP is supposed to use /dev/cdrom. Try changing /mnt/cdrom to /dev/cdrom in the config tab.

dholm,
Thanks for the tip! I'm fixing my mplayer now.

--Aaron
Gentoo 2005.0
Kernel: 2.6.11-skunk6

@ Aaron

a-.. In the 'Video' tab there is a bunch of drivers available. The first is 'xv'. 'gl' & 'gl2' is the bottom. But I'm not sure I can do anything about them.

b- I can mount, umount, read cds, dvds with user. Tried to set permissions, on /mnt/cdrom and /dev/cdrom (witch is a simlink to hdc) doesn't work.
When I start up grip as root I have this message:

(grip:5853): GnomeUI-WARNING **: While connecting to session manager:
Authentication Rejected, reason : None of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed.

(I think this because I'm using Xfce, so it has nothing to do with playing music)( I dont have this message when I run it as user)
I gues, that have to try with other player too.

@ dholm

b- It doesn't matter where I set the cdrom device to (/mnt/cdrom or /dev/cdrom) if I start grip as root it plays music both situation. But for a user, none of the settings helped.

a- when i emerged mplayer i did like this:
When i run 'equery uses mplayer' the altivec line looks like this:
So do I have to put altivec in make.conf anyway? I found a bit unstable thing to put too many use flags in make.conf, because some packages failed to compile that way. That is why I thought to first check a package with --pretend --verbose options to see their use flag situation, then set the needed flags when really emerge them (like above)

rogerius,
I use xv. I also have double buffering and direct render enabled.
I'm not sure what to tell you now. I don't use Grip, I use XMMS.

--Aaron
Gentoo 2005.0
Kernel: 2.6.11-skunk6

Hello there!

Seems like I found a clue for dvd playback...
When I enable dma for the dvd device, everything goes smoothly. I tested the playback with ogle, because mplayer broke during my 'science experience'... Got to reemerge it...

And the other thing about playback (b-): it must be something about permissions. I did the test above as root. As a user, no playback at all. (But as a user I can open cd / dvd and read their contents)
The question: is there a way to check a user witch group belongs to, and if needed correct it?

You don't have to put altivec in make.conf, your method will work as well.
If your system became unstable when you had a lot of USE-flags in make.conf it probably means there is a problem with one of them, please let us know the next time you run into something like that and we might be able to fix it for you.
If you want to set USE-flags on a per package basis you do not have to specify them on the command line each time you emerge. You can also use /etc/portage/package.use. Check man portage for complete instructions. A simple example of package.use: DMA wasn't enabled by default? It should be.
You can edit /etc/conf.d/hdparm and add something like: cdrom0_args="-d1 -X68"
You will have to experiment manually (on a commandline) with the X-option to see which UDMA mode your drive supports. Just run hdparm -d1 -X<num> /dev/cdrom where <num> = 68-71. Use the highest mode the drive accepts.
Run rc-update add hdparm boot to make sure the settings are restored each time you boot your system.
Run groups as the user to see which groups he/she belongs to. To add the user to more groups edit /etc/group as root. Make sure your user is a member of the cdrom group as they have full permissions on cdrom-devices.

CD play problem solved! The problem was: the user was not in the group 'disk'. I set it in /etc/group, did a logout - login, then... yes!

Thank you for the help!

Next I will deal with that dma...

rogerius,

Congradulations!

There is a good guide on setting DMA and some other stuff here: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Use_hdparm ... erformance

--Aaron
Gentoo 2005.0
Kernel 2.6.11-skunk6

Sorry to revive this old thread. But I should append that putting an ordinary user into the group disk is no good idea. The group disk is, as the name says, for full disk access. So you can give users a raw access to harddrives & co which seems vmware needs. Don't ask me further details - I don't know why this is handled by the disk group and not another dedicated one.

For your problem you should try to get the newest udev. The were several... problems with a few version concerning permissions.

HTH,
M