hunter-headers?

[ac0ustic]

I've never posted to a forum before, so please bear with me.  

I'm running Wolvix Cub 1.1.0 (HD install) on an old IBM ThinkPad 1400 series laptop (circa 1998).  I'm using it as a dedicated music player, reading MP3 and FLAC files from an external USB hard drive and playing them back through my home stereo.  I've set it up so it logs into the primary user and starts both blackbox and xmms automatically.  After a great deal of tweaking, I've stripped out all nonessential elements and have reduced the boot time (from power on to music) to about 1 minute 20 seconds.  

What I'd like to do is switch from xmms to mpd, as I'm hoping that'll save both RAM and CPU cycles by getting away from a graphical environment.  Also, I'd love to use a program that more closely approximates gapless playback, and MPD is pretty good where that's concerned.

Here's my problem, in a nutshell.  I can't find MPD as a precompiled package for Slackware 11.0, so I thought I'd build it from source.  That has proven to be difficult.  After reading a bit on the forums here, I installed the necessary build environment, but still no go.  ./configure runs, but the compilers can't find the necessary supporting programs (flac, mad, libmad, etc.), so make fails.  These programs are installed, but the necessary .pc files are missing.

After reading the forums again, I think what I need are the hunter-headers (please correct me if I'm wrong on this).  I can't download them because the Wolvix repository (and the mirror, too, from what I can tell) is down.

So:  several questions.  First, will switching to MPD really help?  Second, will installing the hunter-headers (or the cub-headers) fix my compiling-from-source issue?  Third, does anyone have the hunter-headers as a .tgz file for Wolvix 1.1.0 that they'd be willing to share with me (or know of anywhere I can download them from)?  

I guess another option would be if someone had a pre-built MPD package (ncmpc, too) for Slack 11.0, but I hesitate to get into some of the potential dependency issues there.    

Also, just so you know, I've been running various flavors of Linux for several years now, so I have some idea what I'm doing but I'm no expert.  I just learn what I need to learn so I can do what I want to do.

Before finding Wolvix, I tried to get many other distributions (DSL, N-DSL, Deli, Puppy, Vector, etc.) to run on my hardware (with all needed functionality), but all to no avail.  I think Wolvix is a fantastic distribution, and I'd like to thank the developers for all their hard work on it.  It's great that people are actively developing operating systems that work on older hardware, as this helps keep older computers in use and out of the landfill.  Keep up the good work!

UPDATE:

Oh, and BTW, I tried updating both gslapt and slapt-get recently, per the advice in the forums, but I think I was only able to update one of them -- I forget which one.  I can't access either the primary Wolvix repository or the mirror via http, though, so I'm guessing there are larger issues.  Please correct me if I'm wrong....

[oithona]

Welcome, ac0ustic

I noticed the repo was down yesterday - looking into what to do about it.

Meanwhile, if you edit your /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc file and add this line:

SOURCE=http://wolvix.oithona.com/wolvix/wolvix-1.1.0/

then delete comment out any other repos (#), save, and run

slapt-get --update && slapt-get --install kernel-headers

You should be good to go.

This is a temporary repo I'm setting up til we see what happened to wolvix3.homelinux.net
Currently it only contains the kernel stuff.

Let me know how it goes.

[marin]

please forgive me if you are already aware of the following. if you have a newer machine with wolvix 1.1.0 installed and install neccessary headers from oithona's new repository compilation would succeed. Than you can and issue

Code:

ldd ncmpc

to check if the Wolvix on the old IBM has it all. although, im sure it has. when everything finally runs I'd use top or htop on IBM to see what's the improvement in ram and cpu usage.

usually/generally when compiling a new program that depends on other progs/libs when run, you need 'devel' packages from those others to succeed with compilation.

to run:         binary depends on                                             other libs and progs being installed.
to compile: source depends on headers/devel packages of other libs and progs being installed.

[ac0ustic]

Thank you both for your prompt reply.  I've done as you suggested, oithona -- thank you for hosting an alternate repository!  ./configure ran more successfully this time, though I think it missed the FLAC libraries (and several other things).  In any case, I was able to run both make and make install, so now I have a functioning version of mpd.  :-) 

I still need to get FLAC support working, and I still need to install ncmpc, but those feel like minor details at this point. 

Thanks for all your help, and I'll be sure to update you with my progress.

That's a good idea to run htop once I have it all working, marin.  I'll post comparison figures for mpd+ncmpc versus x+blackbox+xmms when I can, as I looked for this information everywhere and came up empty.  I'd be very surprised if blackbox and xmms turned out to be lighter, but you never know for sure until you run the numbers. 

[ac0ustic]

Just a quick update:  I have MPD working with FLAC files, though not with MP3.  It took me quite a while to figure out why MPD wasn't able to use the localhost address, but then I realized that X was using it.  So I shut down X, restarted MPD, and now all is well.   

As predicted, MPD is a bit lighter on resources than xmms, though on most modern systems it probably wouldn't make any difference.  Total CPU usage when running X / blackbox / xmms / htop and playing FLAC files is about 34%; total CPU usage when running X / blackbox / MPD / htop and playing FLAC files is about 24%.  MPD / htop (without X or blackbox), on the other hand, takes up around 18%. 

Of course this is just a rough estimate, but there was a definite difference.  I guess when testing MPD in X (accomplished by starting MPD first), I should have also been running either ncmpc or pms in another window, but I didn't think of that....  Maybe I'll run another test once I get MP3s working. 

[marin]

im glad it works as you wanted. your own vortexbox

[ac0ustic]

Exactly.  MPD is nice because it'll do crossfading, lossless playback, etc.  And being able to control it from another laptop is fantastic.

I finally got MP3 playback figured out, so now it's all working.  It took me a bit to figure out how to get MPD to recognize that libmad was installed, but adding the .pc file manually did the trick.  A lot of this stuff is obvious once you figure it out, but a little bewildering until then....

And I'm not running ncmpc or pms on the ThinkPad, just controlling MPD with MPC (or another laptop), so that isn't eating up resources, either.  From power on to music is now about a minute, and the whole system is much more functional than I ever thought it would be. 

Thanks again for all your help!

[oithona]

Nice going ac0ustic - how about a write-up for our wiki 0r in the how-to section of the forum?

[ac0ustic]

Thanks for the encouragement -- I've posted an overview of the process at http://forums.wolvix.org/index.php/topic,1644.0.html.  I just hope it's detailed enough to be useful. 

If you see any errors, please let me know.  I find it strange to be posting a how-to, as in many ways I still feel like a newbie when it comes to Linux, but I guess there'll always be more to learn.  :-)

[Lupus]

Hi acOustic,

thank you very much for your overview, well done! I'm now not yet able to do such difficult operations. But probably later, when I have time, your overview will be very useful for me, because I have got an old Computer like yours, which is unused now.
At least you made me curious! Many thanks once more!

Lupus

[oithona]

Nice job ac0ustic - I reckon that will definitely be useful.