XMPlay Support - Running XMPlay under Linux

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Running XMPlay under Linux
by Thomas Radeke, 2007-01-31 23:00:00

What are we trying to do here?

The goal of this tutorial is to get XMPlay up and running using WINE under Linux. I'm using Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft" and WINE 0.9.30 for now and had some success getting XMPlay to play music.

If you know any tweaks that make XMPlay run more stable under WINE, let me know!

What you will need

Admin rights
WINE
a copy of XMPlay
basic knowledge on terminal usage

Getting started

Get your music from your Windows hard disk - mount a NTFS drive

If you came from WinXP, you probably have your music on a NTFS-formatted HD. Some Linux distros like Knoppix mount those automatically - Ubuntu doesn't, so you have to help yourself.

Open a terminal and type

fdisk -l

to find your Windows partition. It will probably be something like /dev/hda1.
Now you will need to create a directory where your NTFS partition will be mounted, that is at which Linux directory you will be able to access the NTFS directory structure. To create such a directory, type

sudo mkdir /mnt/c

Then mount your NTFS partition in read-only mode to the directory you just created, like so:

sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/c/ -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222

Now, you can access your files on your NTFS Windows partition via your Linux file manager (e.g. Nautilus, Konqueror, etc.) by navigating to /mnt/c.

Automatic mounting

You can also let Ubuntu do the mounting automatically at startup - open another terminal and type:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

This will open your file system table ("fstab") and allow you to edit drive associations. Add the following line:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/c ntfs nls=utf8,umask=0222 0 0

Then press Ctrl+O to save (press Enter on the filename), Ctrl+X to quit, then reboot.

More instructions on mounting/unmounting different file systems, see the Ubuntu Guide: How to mount...

Configuring WINE

First you will need to get and install WINE. Instructions on how to do so can be found on the WINE HQ website. There are quite many different distributions and ways to install the WINE packages with them, so I will not try to explain the process here.

After you got WINE installed, you need to configure it properly.
Open a terminal and type

winecfg

to get into the WINE configuration dialog. At the "drives" tab you can assign your mounted NTFS partition to a drive letter - this way you will be able to access your music from within XMPlay easier.

Be sure to go to the "Audio" tab and check at least one device/driver, or you will have no sound!

After you're done configuring, close winecfg.

Running XMPlay

If you have configured everything, you can run XMPlay by typing

wine "/mnt/c/Program Files/XMPlay/xmplay.exe"

If the main window shows up, check the output devices in the Options & Stuff dialog. If you see a device like "dmix:0", select it. If you don't see any normal output device, try configuring WINE to use another audio driver.

If you're running XMPlay directly from a NTFS drive and don't have NTFS-3G (write support!) installed, be sure to check the "Store per-user config/etc" option on the Miscellaneous tab, or XMPlay won't save any configuration changes.

If XMPlay crashes during startup, try using a "virgin" copy of XMPlay with no additional plugins.

Adding a shortcut to your desktop

If you want to run XMPlay from your desktop without having to type the "sudo wine..." command every time, right-click on your desktop and chose "Create new launcher...". Chose "Terminal Application", enter "XMPlay" as name and use the whole "sudo wine ..." line from above as command. As icon, you can use this image, which I once created for dock-like applications.