Mostly Harmless

When I read news about availability of linux version of democracy player, I decided to try it. But unfortunately no SuSE packages or build instructions were available. But, after hours of hard work, I managed to install it on my x86_64 machine running SuSE linux 10.0. Here is what I did.

First I installed Pyrex. Since version 0.9.3 of Pyrex is buggy, I installed v0.9.4.1 by compiling from sources. I also installed mozilla-config from rpm using YaST. Then I installed boost from source (rpm I had, had some problems). To install boost, bjam is required, which fortunately was available as rpm, and I used YaST to install it. After installing bjam, I used the following procedure to install boost.

tar zxvf boost_1_33_0.tar.gz
cd boost_1_33_0
export PYTHON_VERSION=2.4
export PYTHON_LIB_PATH=/usr/lib64/python2.4/
export PYTHON_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/python2.4/
sudo bjam "-sTOOLS=gcc" install

I then proceeded to install Democracy player from source. Democracy source must reside in directory named tv. Also libboost_python-gcc-mt-1_33.so.1.33.0 had to be manually linked to libboost_python.so. Since boost was installed in /usr/local/, I also had to set appropriate CPPFLAGS and LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

tar zxvf Democracy-0.8.2-Source.tar.gz
mv Democracy-Player-0.8.2/ tv
cd tv/platform/gtk-x11/
export DEMOCRACY_RESOURCE_ROOT=/usr/share/democracy/resources/
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include/boost-1_33/"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/opt/mozilla/bin/:$PATH
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libboost_python-gcc-mt-1_33.so.1.33.0 /usr/local/lib/libboost_python.so
python setup.py install --root=/

This installed Democracy player, but I still wasn't able to start it, because gtkmozembed was not available. I then had to compile gnome-python-extras-2.12.1 from source.

tar zxvf gnome-python-extras-2.12.1.tar.gz; cd gnome-python-extras-2.12.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make
sudo make install

Now to start Democracy Player, I need to

cd tv/platform/gtk-x11/
export DEMOCRACY_RESOURCE_ROOT=/usr/share/democracy/resources/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/opt/mozilla/bin/:$PATH
python democracyplayer

After installation, I started Democracy and downloaded a few videos (which were saved to ~/Movies/Democracy/). While videos played fine, there was no sound. I tried playing videos with mplayer they worked fine. The problem was with xine, and I had to install xine from source again. After all this, Democracy is now working fine (except that it has loads of bugs and is very unstable).

# posted by nileshbansal @ 12:21 am - -   -bookmark at -del.icio.us   -