Things are good

VLC does play media files, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for anything other than stock-standard formats. DivX movies crash VLC, real MPEG movies play, MP3s, Oggs and Flacs play.

I also found that I'd forgotten to include the Flac package for encoding, so half of AiffInterchange doesn't work at the moment. I did test the Wav portion, and that worked perfectly.

I'm glad I managed to figure out how to add Backports to the sources.list! Gnash is now in Copland, and I'm surprised to say that it works really well. It's terribly terribly slow on my iMac, but winnoise.swf works well (the visuals are slower than the audio, but everything works) and a little game I found called Penguin works too - although much too slowly to be playable. Still, it should all be a good help when you encounter Flash-based sites.

The other little problem with Gnash is that the menu item for the standalone Gnash player doesn't actually do anything - you must invoke it from the command-line. Little things like that bug me - I could knock up a reasonable GUI frontend in Pythoncard in an hour, and someone could make a good one in Glade and Python in a couple of hours. So why this inconsistancy?

Note to self: Write GUI frontend for Gnash Player.

The other problem I noticed was that the Administration File Manager menu item gives the error "Missing command to run". Oh, and Ubiquity still crashes - I'll try turning swap off.