Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

Ron Clarke wrote:
>
> NOTE: editing the /user/.mplayer/config to include vo=vesa meant that trying
> to run that configuration under X resulted in a blank screen and complete
> keyboard lock-up that required a hard re-boot, so don't try this at home,
> folks.

You can put multiple drivers in the vo argument and mplayer will try
one at a time until it finds one that works. So 'vo=x11,vesa,svga'
will try all three in that order. If vesa works and you are not in X,
it will use that instead of svga. But if you are in X, mplayer will use
X and your screen and keyboard will not lock up.

>    And my video card (Diamond Stealth 2 MB) is vesa 1.2 compliant.

Interesting. The manpage says that vesa is a 'Very  general  output
driver that should work on any VESA VBE 2.0 compatible card.'
It did not work on my laptop's i810-compatible card, which is
supposedly vesa 2.

> > Specify -vo caca if you want colour ASCII art display. That shouldn't
> > require any special permissions since it goes straight to the
> > terminal.
>
>     What is that going to do to video ?

It would make it look ugly. It's only a last resort if everything else fails.

> > However, your mention of the fact that
> > mp3s play from the command line as user is interesting. Is your
> > mp3 player suid or does it perhaps send audio to /dev/audio
> > instead of /dev/dsp?
>
>    I play MP3s from the commandline using your mplayer.
> It wasn't the sound part at all that was blocking the sound.

Correct, it was svgalib, which drops root privileges for
security purposes as soon as it is done initializing the
graphics card.

David