I backed up my laptop, and installed Ubuntu.

I was quite impressed at the amount of stuff that just worked.

Straight away, I had proper video support, including direct rendering, and audio, wireless, and the keyboard volume controls working.

This was all stuff that took me hours over a couple of weeks to get working when I installed Debian when I first got my laptop.

Anyway, I went through and installed the "non free" stuff, like an mp3 encoder, and mplayer, and ffmpeg.

I also put on java, and a couple of other things.

Getting all my apps working, like Gaim, and Thunderbird was no great task, I just copied the . directories from my backup, and didn't have to reconfigure them.

I found that mplayer wouldn't render any WMV files for some reason, I'd installed the codec pack, from the mplayer site, but it didn't make much difference, instead of refusing to play the videos, it crashes.

I decided to build it. I downloaded the latest source from here.

I unpacked it, and configured it, but found that I was missing a compiler.

It doesn't support gcc4.0, so I only installed 3.3, but then it complained I had no optimised compiler.

I'd installed a new kernel as part of an apt upgrade, so I rebooted to get that running.

After that, it made no difference. Also, I lost my volume control, and I still didn't have cpu frequency scaling. I think I might have to build a custom kernel.

I had to install gcc, to get the optimised compiler, which also included gcc4.0, but mplayer was able to use gcc3.3.

I found that it configured with a few supported file types missing.

First it was vstream, for watching tivo files, I needed to install the vstream-client, which I got from here, and then I didn't have dvdread support.

I'd previously installed the css library, according to the instructions on the ubuntu site here, and I thought I needed the "libdvdread3-dev" package installed, but it still didn't add DVD support.

I then realised it had been disabled, because I had a different type of dvd support enabled.

I noticed that ALSA support was disabled, so I installed alsa-source, but that didn't make any difference, I found I needed "libasound2-dev", this gave me alsa support.

I was missing x264 support, I got the latest CVS snapshot from here, I configured it, and got a warning with it wanting to check my svn version.

I installed "subversion", reconfigured x264, tried to compile it, but found I was missing nasm.

I installed nasm, and then was able to compile and install x264.

I reconfigured mplayer again, which still didn't pickup x264 support. When I checked the configure.log, I found there was an error:

/usr/local/lib/libx264.a(encoder.o): In function `x264_encoder_encode':
encoder.c:(.text+0x5ade): undefined reference to `pthread_create'
encoder.c:(.text+0x5b14): undefined reference to `pthread_join'

I'm not sure what the solution to that is. I tried rebuilding x264, but it didn't fix it.

I went on to deal with no Xvid support. I built it as I did yesterday when building ffmpeg, including having to fix the gcc symlink.

I compiled and installed that, and mplayer's configure picked it up.

I went to find out why I had no DivX4/5 support, because I was missing decore.h, but I couldn't find a package or source download that included this.

I started compiling mplayer. And waited a long time. It finished compiling, and I installed it.

It ran, and attempted to play the video files I'd not been able to before, but still didn't work properly.

The audio worked, but the video wouldn't render. It was complaining that "The selected video_out device is incompatible with this codec."

I tried forcing it to gl2, like I used to do, to get proper scaling, but found that I didn't have gl2 support.

I installed the libx11-dev package, and the x11proto-gl-dev package. That gave me the x11 headers, and libs, but not x11 somehow, and still not the OpenGL support.

I then installed freeglut3-dev, and libgl-mesa-dev and libglu1-mesa-dev. But I still didn't have opengl support. I don't know what I need to install to get that.

I managed to get DivX support, I had to download the installer from here, which is a binary distribution, so there was nothing to configure or compile.