Jim, On Tuesday 26 October 2004 09:15, Jim Worrest wrote:

I decided to install the new mplayerplug-in for Mozilla on a computer using apt-get. BIG MISTAKE! Now I can't get Mozilla or Synaptic to boot up. The boot up of my 9.0 Pro from grub even doesn't act the same. Is there a cure for this? ---Jim

Of course not. Your computer will never work again. Just buy a new one and all new software distributions and start over. Now... First off, I don't know what sort of actions apt takes that could have effects outside the packages to which it is applied. I stick to YaST / YOU, some manually installed RPMs and some non-RPM packages. The latter are generally self-contained and don't seem to interfere. Mozilla is one of these, by the way. Next, when I first got MPlayer and tried to use the plug-in with my Mozilla install (not the SuSE-supplied one, which lags too far behind Mozilla development for me, but the latest provided on Mozilla.org, 1.7.0 at the time) it would not work because the MPlayer plug-in was compiled for GTK2 and the Linux release of Mozilla provided by Mozilla.org was built for GTK1 (presumably because that's more universally available than GTK2). Nowadays Mozilla.org supplies a GTK2-based build, and with that MPlayer works fine. I did not have the symptoms you did, but I have in the past found incompatible extension software (I'm thinking of the spell-check, which at one time was a separately supplied add-on) would prevent Mozilla from even launching. You may be experiencing a similar problem, since Netscape 7 is, I think, even more archaic than the Mozilla 1.6 supplied by SuSE. I'd recommend you get the latest GTK2-based build of Mozilla from Mozilla.org. That will enable you to use the MPlayer plug-in. It is otherwise compatible with things like your settings and bookmark files. You may need to retrieve new skins that are compatible with the version of Mozilla you install. Randall Schulz