winamp: Linux?

[NickJones]

The Console commands (Terminal/Bash) are to mount a locked NTFS file system. I haven't had much experience with Fedora but if you aren't too settled in and are prepared to make the move to Ubuntu 9.10 (Great OS) then I can help you and tell you how to get it all to work, but, I have no idea about packages and stuff for Fedora.
Ubuntu guys also send you a free CD with 9.10 on it, so you dont even have to download it, (and it comes rapped in bubble rap so you have somthing to do during the 10 minutes it takes to install. Then you will have all the afforementioned software. And more once you install it from the package manager.
Nick

[headcrab]

I can't change the OS of the laptop. I'm stuck with Fedora 10.
How would I install Winamp under Wine? Could I then access the hard drive through the emulator?

[renegadeblack]

Originally Posted by headcrab

I can't change the OS of the laptop. I'm stuck with Fedora 10.
How would I install Winamp under Wine? Could I then access the hard drive through the emulator?

First off, Wine Is Not an Emulator. That's where the name comes from.
Second, yes, you can.

[porkchop]

NickJones, Ubuntu does have NTFS support out of the box (at least since Intrepid, it didn't in Hardy and previous), but not all Linux distros do. Fedora 10 is one of those disros that does not support NTFS formatting out of the box. What you have to do is install "ntfs-3g" apparently the command line installer in Fedora is yum so you have to open the terminal and run the following command (without the quotes) with super user (or root) access:

"yum install ntfs-3g"

That will install the necessary drivers to read NTFS formatting. There are several ways to get root access. Because it sounds like you are not an especially experienced Linux user I would suggest adding "sudo " in front of the command so it reads:

"sudo yum install ntfs-3g"

Then it will prompt for your administrative password, and allow you to install the program. Alternately your first command in the terminal could be:

"su -"

It would ask you for your password and the preceding "sudo" would be unnecessary. The difference is the "su -" gives you root access for the whole terminal session. If you open the terminal to install that program and then close it afterwards it doesn't matter, but if you are going to use the terminal session to do other things then if you use "su -" you are running the risk of modifying things that you don't want modified. This is one of the big security advantages of Linux that it has this root access protection and one of the reasons it is so hard to write viruses and such for. It can be a pain to type "sudo ...." a million times, but it is certainly worth it if you aren't absolutely sure what you are doing.

As a side note all Fedora specific information came from the Unofficial Fedora FAQ, you might check it out at http://www.fedorafaq.org it looks like a good jumping point.

One last note, you can always change the OS on any computer, especially if you're talking about Linux. It's just a matter of how much work you want to put into it (mainly in file backup and learning new programs)

[porkchop]

Originally Posted by headcrab

I can't change the OS of the laptop. I'm stuck with Fedora 10.
How would I install Winamp under Wine? Could I then access the hard drive through the emulator?

Wine is great idea, especially for programs that you simply can't find on Linux, but it's still running a totally different OS file system along with your Linux one, that's probably unneeded overhead for a music player, especially since Linux has so many great players available for it. I would seriously look into one of the great Linux alternatives listed here in this thread.

[headcrab]

I talked to our IT guy who said that sometimes drives can't be accessed on Linux if you didn't "safely remove hardware" the last time it was used on Windows. He forced the drive to unmount, remounted it, and now it works properly.
Rhythmbox player seems to take forever to scan the library, but that might be due to the USB 1.1 ports on this laptop.

[FixerOfThings]

The best substitute for Winamp on Linux would be Amarok, in my opinion. I'm currently running it on Debian with a similarly large music library. There are a couple of things to know before starting with it though. First, the 1.4 version is much better than the new 2.x which is just starting to get feature parity with the 1.4.x version (though you may try it also, I gave up when Ubuntu first got it in the repository, and switched to Debian instead). The other thing is that depending on how your disk is formatted you may have some issues. NTFS is kind of slow on linux especially when tagging multiple files at the same time (fixing genres for example). The other thing for large libraries is that the default embedded database type is not great for huge libraries. You can find instructions on how to set it up with MySQL online, which gives much better performance. I have tried other programs, but they just don't seem to scale well for large collections. Then again my computer is kind of old. I don't know how well it works with external drives, but I do know that you should mount the drive BEFORE you start Amarok to avoid having it try to update a "nonexisting" library.

[waynehoskins]

I'm late jumping in, but here's what I've tried:

Amarok is nice. It's pretty. It has bells and whistles that I'll never use.

I use MPD and Sonata at the church. MPD is server, Sonata is an MPD client (there are others). I can run the client and server on separate boxes so I don't have to have multiple consoles up. It's nice for what I need.