Newbie: need help getting mplayer installed (dep hell)

I'd appreciate any help someone could give trying to get mplayer installed in the newest knoppix 3.3 9/24/03.
I've remastered it getting rid of all games, koffice, language packs to make room and getting rid of unnecesary/unused packages but when it came to replacing xine with mplayer 0.90 I got some dependency hell with libvorbis. libvorbis0a 1.0.0-3 (176kb) is already installed but mplayer wants libvorbis0 1.0rc3. I've finally gotten a repository with the correct version but when I try to update the package it tells me it will also take kde-base and several other packages (40mb) with it. Which obviously I don't wanna do that but I'm not sure what I need to do. I am a relative newbie to linux, only been on for a year or so and trying to get into debian cause I love apt-get and redhat is getting annoying.

i'd really appreciate your time and help
thanks in advance
Geoff

Quote:

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Originally Posted by freeballer

I'd appreciate any help someone could give trying to get mplayer installed in the newest knoppix 3.3 9/24/03.
I've remastered it getting rid of all games, koffice, language packs to make room and getting rid of unnecesary/unused packages but when it came to replacing xine with mplayer 0.90 I got some dependency hell with libvorbis. libvorbis0a 1.0.0-3 (176kb) is already installed but mplayer wants libvorbis0 1.0rc3. I've finally gotten a repository with the correct version but when I try to update the package it tells me it will also take kde-base and several other packages (40mb) with it. Which obviously I don't wanna do that but I'm not sure what I need to do. I am a relative newbie to linux, only been on for a year or so and trying to get into debian cause I love apt-get and redhat is getting annoying.

i'd really appreciate your time and help
thanks in advance
Geoff

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Ok try this.

You need to open /etc/apt/sources.list in a text editor and add the repositories listed at the bottom of this page (at least the testing and unstable entries.

Then do an apt-get update.

Finally try installing mplayer with this command.

apt-get -t unstable install mplayer

The "-t unstable" part should help you out with your dependencies. It works for me at least.

libvorbis is one of the most troublesome package I have seen in debian. The solution I have which seems to be working quite nicely is to pin it in the /etc/apt/preferences file.

Package: libvorbis
Pin: release a=stable
Priority: 1001

In this way, no matter whatever source you have, so long you have the woody/stable in sources.list, it would be installed and the woody source is rc3. You can alter the Pin condition to exact version string too. There is some documentation in www.debian.org which talks about pinning, worth reading if you mix repository sources.

Altering the sources.list is an alternative(as suggested by aay) but I want to have a fixed sources.list and still be able to mix and match packages(that is really a tough task) from different repositories.

really tnx... libvorbis has caused me lots of trouble, too. there seem to be several incompattible versions like v 1.0a vs 1.0rc3. some progs really need 1.0a, others 1.0rc3 - and both can't be installed. very stupid imho... Hope they fix it before the new stable comes out ;)

thank you both for your help in this matter, you've both given me some great ideas to get this working and i appreciate your help. I just wanted to say that again cause you've both given me some great info