I recently made a decision to keep Windows XP Pro on one computer and migrate all of my other computers to Ubuntu Linux 6.10. I have no plans to migrate to Vista. After scanning the forum for info on getting Media Center to work in linux, I found that, for the most part, posters where not having much success. Being an advanced Windows user, but only a novice with Linux, I thought MC might work on a linux box if "WINE" was used. Well, to make things a little easier, I selected a commercial version of "Wine" called "Crossover Office" by a company called Codeweavers. The software is reasonably priced at $40 (home version) and $70 (Pro version) and you get a fully featured 30 day demo to play with before you buy. You also get 1 year of level 2 (internet) support if you buy the Pro version.
Crossover Office, allows you to install and use an impressively large number of Windows apps and games. Not being a gamer, I was only interested in the apps. Crossover provides a complete windows environment in a package called a "bottle". Each "bottle" holds a "c drive", "program files" directory, and a "windows" directory complete with all required open source windows APIs. The idea is that you install each specific windows app into a "bottle" which can be Win98, Win2000 or WinXP based. Each installed windows app runs in its own bottle thereby protecting all of your other windows apps, installed in different "bottles", from interacting negatively with each other, avoiding system crashes. This is a significant difference, in my view, from the way open source "WINE" works. Crossover Office is based on WINE, but more robust and easier to use.
I first tried installing MC 12.0.164 in its own WinXP Bottle. This failed miserably. I deduced from that failure that MC needed to be installed in a "bottle" that also contained "IE6" and "Windows Media Player". Crossover Office warns against installing unsupported apps (like MC) into "bottle" contained supported apps like IE6 and WMP. Anyway, I installed "IE6" from the list of Crossover Office supported apps. By default, Crossover Office created an Win98 Bottle for the installation of IE6. Instead of going with the default install of IE6, I chose a "custom" install so that I could add Windows Media Player to the same "bottle" as IE6. The installation worked flawlessly and when done, I was able to run IE6 in Linux as if I was on my WinXP box.
Now, I wasn't crazy about a Win98 Bottle for running MC12, but this was a test, so I did not try to redo everything in a Win2000 or WinXP bottle. My next step was to download the trial version of MC 12.0.164 and try to install it into the same Win98 Bottle that IE6/WMP were in. After Crossover Office gave me a warning that this wasn't a good idea (which I ignored) I went ahead and checked off that I wanted to installed an unsupported piece of software. I then browsed to the location in my linux home directory where I had downloaded the MC12 exe file and selected it. I then checked off that I wanted this installation to go into the Win98 Bottle I had created for IE6/WMP9.
The installation proceeded. The only thing I noticed wrong, was that the MC window for reading the license agreement was blank, but I could still click on it to accept the terms and off the install went. When done, along side my IE6 desktop icon, I had an MC12 icon (albeit without an MC image for the icon face). I double clicked on the icon and MC12 opened in all its glory!
So far so good. Now the harder part. My 25,000 track library is on the Ubuntu box on a drive E which is NTFS formatted. Drive C, my boot drive, is a dual boot system (WinXP/Ubuntu Linux). In order to get linux to see the windows ntfs drive I had to first install a special driver package in linux called "ntfs-3g" which allows the linux system to read and write to windows ntfs drives. I also had to remember that, unlike windows, linux sees everything as a "file" including hard discs. I also had to correctly edit my Fstab file to properly identify my ntfs drives in linux. In my case, my windows E: music drive is identified, in linux, as "/dev/sdb1" with a mount point of "/media/WindowsMusic ntfs-3g defaults, locale=en_US.utf8 0 0". Almost reads like I know what I'm doing. ?
Ok, now that I have linux set to see and read/write to my windows ntfs drive holding my music files, I open MC12, go to options and point it to "/media/WindowsMusic/Music" as the "file" where all my music tracks are located. I then tell MC12 to import all the files and 16 minutes and 59 seconds later, all my music files and their cover art are now in MC12 on my Crossover Office/MC12 installation. But will they play? Yes, they will as long as MC12 has the proper codecs installed (which it does for everything but FLAC
).
OK, that's the good news. The bad news, so far:
> a big downer for me, Theater View crashes the program instantly. I don't know why, I'm not that smart. The other 3 views do work.
> I downloaded the FLAC plugins, but I can't get them to install because of the way Crossover Office works. I think it more accurate to say, I can't get them to install because I don't know enough yet. It would be a lot easier if MC12 would auto download and install FLAC rather than forcing you to have to get the plugins from Sourceforge and manually install them.
Haven't gotten to the rest of the program to see what else may be broken.
Anyway, apologies for the long winded post. But, I thought some of you might be interested to know it can be done. Now, here's hoping that someday, in the not too distant future, JimH and company will consider porting MC12 to Linux
Edit: Feb 23, 2007 @2:23pm: Just downloaded and updated to build 179 through MC12's check for update. Worked flawlessly, but desktop icon still has no image in it.
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Topic: FYI - MC12 can work in Linux --- Sort Of (Read 5056 times)