Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Wed, 11 May 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

> On Wed, 11 May 2005, David Moberg wrote:
>
> > I found a playmidi binary for glibc-2.1!
> >
> > ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/7.3/en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/playmidi-2.4-16.i386.rpm
>
> Would this require the SW81 glibc?
I downloaded it.

I tried to convert it with mcmenu (a former list member J. P. compiled it 
for us) and 'something is wrong with the package'.

I installed rpm2tgz and it produced a tgz package 128 bytes long.  The 
package is about 40K.

I installed cpio.tgz and used your method and was told
"unknown file type' and then "premature end of file"

I then did a search on playmidi*rpm and found a site with several packages 
for rpm and deb and other things (not a tgz package) and since the first 
few URLs were not accessible I downloaded a version 2.4-9 rpm which I 
converted with rpm2tgz and got a 40K .tgz which I was able to installpkg 
in BL2.

ldd revealed that it needs libc6 and libncurses.so.4.  I have 
libncurses.so.5.2 so made a symlink and the program seems happy now but I 
have not tried it out.  I need to make /dev/sequencer first (look up the 
numbers for it).

I should skip trying to compile in BL3 for a while.  Someone remind me to 
STOP starting new projects for a few months.  We are supposed to be 
building a house, specifically, designing an air exchange system that we 
can run using some sort of data acquisition software and/or hardware maybe 
some day with linux.  So I also started piano lessons, having gotten 
interested in all this music stuff.  I am supposed to be listening to 
different versions of the same piece - I hope MIDI counts.

> I will first attempt to find the developers' ncurses.tgz package in SW40 
> or compile without it (but I think you need it to display if you don't 
> want to use svgalib or X11).

I still ought to keep trying to compile for BL3.

But I can't get playmidi 2.4.9 libc6 to play a midi yet.

mknod /dev/sequencer c 14 1

playmidi jazz.mid  'no playback device found'  (trying to use a default)
playmidi -f jazz.mid   ( -f to play on a non-midi soundcard)
        'no playback device found'

Configure let me choose my own default as AWE32 but there is no mention of 
AWE32 in the man file for this version (9).

I think I have a Vibra AWE32 in this computer.  It should also work with 
FM synthesis, but sound worse.

I am going to take a break from all this after I figure out, again, how to 
use SANE to copy my piano sheet music.  I can listen to midi files in DOS.

> > Use rpm2tgz to convert to a Slackware package. If you don't have rpm2tgz, 
> > but do
> > have cpio, you can also do:
> >
> > cd /
> > dd if=/full/path/to/playmidi-2.4-16.i386.rpm of=playmidi.cpio bs=4209 
> > skip=1
> > cpio -i --make-directories < playmidi.cpio

> > This will directly install it.

All methods would work better on a non-defective package.
Bad download?

> > David