Ximian GNOME and RealPlayer Woes
This morning I checked the Ximian web site to see what the status of Red Carpet was. Red Carpet is their maintenance tool for Linux that keeps your distributions up to date, along with Ximian GNOME and Red Carpet itself. Their previous work, Helix GNOME Updater, is an excellent tool that I've used for a long time. The initial release of Red Carpet had the problem of enforcing dependencies in Red Hat, and because of a foolish oversight in the making of the PostgreSQL 7.02 RPMs, I had to install them as --nodeps, which lead to problems. The update that I obtained today fixes that and several other things. Excellent work by the Ximian folks.
This afternoon I found out that the RealPlayer7 on my Linux machines has expired. So I go to Real Networks and see that they have finally started supporting Linux as well as they support Windows. There's a Linux RPM on their site for RealPlayer8 - the latest version. That's incredible news! So I get it, install it on my laptop, and test it. Looks good. Plays the content. I'd say I'm pretty happy now.
I upgrade my other Linux box, and then look at the Solaris/SPARC version. Uh oh... now we're getting more like the old Real Networks. They haven't updated the player for SPARC - it's still RealPlayer7, and the news from their support groups is that they have upgraded the UltraSPARC version, but they haven't upgraded the SPARC version. This is making me nervous because Real has the annoying habit of making their code expire, and that means that I need to see a new version of RealPlayer7 or 8 for SPARC really soon.
I then checked on the Irix situation, and again, if you run 6.5, they have RealPlayer 8. The problem is that it only supports the MIPS4 architecture - so barney is going to be out of luck there as well. It appears that Real is supporting the latest hardware eventhough older hardware is still very much in use. If I try to run the Real Player 7 for Irix 6.3, I get messages saying that it's can't decode certain content, and in reality, it doesn't decode any content at all.
So it seems as though sparky and barney are not considered to be viable hardware platforms by Real Networks. Well... I certainly understand their position, but I think they are as wrong as they can be. They need to embrace the Unix community to hedge against Microsoft and MediaPlayer. If they support Unix well then they have the ability to claim better interoperability, which is what a lot of web sites are going for. Look at Flash plugins... they're trying to support Unix, and it's done pretty well by them.
Anyway, the bottom line is that my Linux machines have RealPlayer8 and sparky has a lingering RealPlayer7 while barney doesn't have a functioning player. Gosh! I wish it were better supported.