My MP3s don't work!

One day, long ago, while all was going quitely in Linux land, someone suddenly stood to claim that all programs which decode MP3s had to pay royalties to the developers of the MP3 format. Even though soon after, someone else refuted the claim, showing that free decoders never had and never would have to pay a licencing fee, the damage had been done.

RedHat, fearing a lawsuit, removed all MP3 decoders from the MediaPlayers in their distrubtion. To play MP3 files on XMMS, you have to install an MP3 plugin from an external source. An appropriate RPM is available from the XMMS website.

Even though we all know we should be using OggVorbis anyway...

Installing XimianDesktop 2 breaks AptForRpm

This problem can manifest itself in many different ways. It is caused by some bogus db4 packages with incorrectly set the obsoletes field. See http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=44442 for more details. You might see something like this

# apt-get upgrade Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.

The following packages have unmet dependencies

db4: Obsoletes: db1 but 1.85-0.ximian.6.1 is installed

E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

A simple fix is to replace your bogus db4 package with the corresponding fixed one from http://www.math.utah.edu/~newren/my-ximian-db4-packages/.

To find out which one you need, check which one you have

rpm -qa | grep ^db4

Then download and install the fixed packages

rpm -Uvh package1 package2

Now everything should be back in good order.

Another, more complex solution is described at http://thomas.apestaart.org/linux/ximian-rh9-apt.php.

Glibc Bug

This fault is particular to RedHat 8.0. There are several open bugs on http://bugzilla.redhat.com, but no thorough fix. The fault is thus:

Whenever the total members of one group (including the group name and group id) exceed a certain number of characters on that group's line in /etc/group, the group fails. This number seems to vary depending on type of members, position in the file, etc. When the limit is reached, group functions cease to work. For instance, even when everything worked correctly before, if adding user joebloggs to group users that line reaches the "breaking point", you will get something like this

[root@somebox etc?# groups joebloggs id: cannot find name for group ID 100

All groups after that line in /etc/group will fail also.

Unlikely as it seems, the fix is to upgrade the glibc packages to those in RawHide?, despite the major version change.

GreigMcGill says this fault nearly drove him insane. While he was dubious about the fix at first, all has gone well. He thanks JohnMcPherson, PerryLorier, DanielLawson, and all the others on that stressful day on IRC.