Currently I’m in London for a weeks work with my associate Andrew. And that means usually listen to BBC radio. I thought that I would fire up the BBC Radio website and listen to some music in the morning. And all they are doing is RealPlayer. So I looked a bit more and there is ofcuase a RealPlayer install for Linux. Current version is RealPlayer 11. But its not that easy. RealPlayer don’t work with pulseaudio so that has to be sorted out and there are also problems with RealPlayer and firefox. There is also a small glitch in firefox. They have moved all the application associations out to a separate pane in the preference windows, but on my machine the list it totally empty.

So there are thing to fix and get going before its all ok.

Firefox and empty application list

So apparently after some googeling there is one package that’s not getting installed when installing firefox on a Kubuntu system. Its the firefox-gnome-support package.

So I install that with:

And that solves the problem with the application list and its now filled up with the applications to open for different file types.

Install Realplayer

So next in the list is to install RealPlayer.

There are some packages you can find for the RealPlayer out there but its not hard to download the player from Realplayer site directly.

I did the following.

• Create a temporary directory – if you dont have one already
• Go to teh directory you just created
• Download the bin file with wget
• Change permissions on the file
• and run it to install all the parts

So open a terminal window and do the following:

For all the question you can use the default. It will install itself and install a link in the multimedia sub menu.

Get RealPlayer to work with pulseaudio

Unfortunately realplayer is one of these other applications that don’t work with pulseaudio, and trying it to run to alsa will even crash it without any error messages on my system. But there are the god news that padsp program works with it. So running

starts up realplayer with the emulates oss driver and you can the go in and select oss as the sound driver under tools->preferences->hardware and it will play perfectly under pulseaudio.

The only thing left now it to change the menu and file association for the realplayer files to play with padsp realplay.

Go in and click on the kde menu, and the click on the multimedia sub menu and the right click on the realplayer menu item and select Edit Item from the menu. In the box that comes up change the command from realplay %U to padsp realplay %U. This will also change the file association for realplayer audio files so when clicking on a file it will startup padsp first and have realplayer working on that virtual device. Don’t forget to save the setting when you are done.

Realplayer and firefox

Last in the list of things to fix is fixing so that you can click and listen to a file directly from firefox. Unfortunately, no matter of how I trie to fix this it will not work. So the best solution for this is to get into prefrences->applications and set the filetype realaudio to save file. Then when you click on the link – save the file somewhere (in /tmp is what i usually do and then manually open it with padsp realplay). Im kind of sorry and anoyed that I could not get this to work but I guess its a combination from both the 64 bits version of firefox and that the realplayer is a 32 bits and the fact that realplayer also dont work with the pulseaudio. I hate being beeten but as I can workaround it its end of this for now.