Linpus Lite compatible apps

It seems I've read that care must be taken in installing software in Linpus Lite, as the core of the system is modified such that Fedora 8 software won't necessarily be compatible. That and my lack of linux knowhow have led me to only install things which I've seen mentioned here as safe, such as Skype, Wormux, and Beneath a Steel Sky, or which due to their terminal-heavy complexity to get installed on the system, have walkthroughs, such as the normal xfce desktop, VLC, the Thunar archiver tools addon, and Firefox 3. There are more things I'd like to do, like replace Mplayer with a better and non-fullscreen mp3 player and an omni-format image viewer with basic resizing and extension-changing capability (like Irfanview for Windows), but not having dug into how to make a backup yet at this point, I have no confidence in adding these things.

Is there a list of applications somewhere, verified to work with Linpus Lite and not brick it? If not, could you list things that work here?

Also, could you recommend a good audio player (something like foobar2000 for XP), a quick image viewer with resizing and extension-changing abilities (like Irfanview for XP) and maybe the best way to remove Mplayer and Messenger, should I manage better replacements?

Thanks.

 

I would imagine that anything that can be installed from the default fedora 8 repository will be safe to install. By safe I mean that it won't break your system to install it -- not that you you won't break your system installing it. Because I removed all the Acer tools from my AA1 the first day I got it, I don't know if there is a GUI interface to the default repository -- I suspec there is.

But I would just go to the terminal and do

yum list all

which gives me many pages of output. To find out what a package does (if it's not clear from the name -- and often it isn't)

yum info [package_name]

Then to install

sudo yum install [package_name]

yum will tell you if the package has dependencies which also have to be downloaded, and the total size of the download. It will prevent the installation if it is clear that any part of the download will clash with something already installed.

You can also point yum at different repositories -- I think you'll need to do this to replace mplayer with VLC, as many users do. If you search this forum for `VLC' I'm sure you'll find out how to do this.

Generally, if you work with `yum', it's pretty difficult to install anything that will break the system by being incompatible.

None of this means that what you install will work, however. If it need 4Gb RAM at 200Gb of disk, then obviously it's not going to work.

Another hint: if you use yum and it tells you it has to download X other packages, make a note of their names. If you later decide to remove what you downloaded, you'll need to remove all the other bits as well because they probably won't be doing anything for you.

 

A fast and simple image viewer I like is ristretto which you can find in the default repositories via add/remove software. Don't know if it does all you want it to, as I haven't used Irfanview, but it's nice and unintrusive for viewing images.

For a messenger replacement you could try amsn, also in the repo's. It's (imo) butt-ugly, but there are skins out there somewhere...

I'm using vlc for music files because I haven't found a good music player (vlc works fine anyway). Looking for something simple and wonderful in the spirit of foobar for windows. If anyone knows someone that knows someone that knows something like that... would be great to hear more suggestions

peace
P.