Hey, I just joined the forum today as I wanted to ask if there are any special things I should do to make this work.  Love Amarok, by the way!

I really, really miss the G-Force visualization.  I'm a paid customer over there at soundspectrum.com of their G-Force Platinum for Windows.  I duel-boot Debian Lenny and Vista.  I don't actually do my music listening (or much else) in Windows these days as Amarok and Linux rules, but I don't believe they've updated G-Force to work in Vista yet anyway.

What I was delighted to notice when I used OpenSUSE was that the libvisual plugin made an older version of G-Force run in Amarok.  It seemed just as good as the newer versions in Windows to me.

I recently made a switch to Debian Lenny.  I noticed immediately that G-Force and a few others that were in the SUSE version of libvisual-plugins were purposely removed from the Debian version because of the non-free nature of some of these.

Doing some research, I've managed to download the official releases of libvisual and libvisual-plugins from sourceforge.  They appear to be the same version that Debian uses but without the specific Debian modifications.  I extracted the packages and noticed that G-Force is in there.  Cool, if I can figure out a good way to get it installed.

I hope you can advise me of the best way to accomplish this.  Should I aptitude purge only the libvisual-plugins package, or both libvisual and libvisual-plugins?  I know the ./configure, make, make-install routine but I'd like to know if I should do anything special as far as switches for the .configure step.  Should I change the default /usr/local installation location to just /usr?  Does leaving it as /usr/local mess things up if I leave the Debian libvisual installed where it is and just purge libvisual-plugins and compile the sourceforge version? Will all this stuff work its way into Amarok properly without some special .configure switch I should set?

I really don't want to proceed without some advice here.  Just as an intuition I figure I'd better purge both libvisual and libvisual plugins and then install both new versions so everything will match, but I am not as intuitive (no clue) what else I might need to do besides ./configure, make , su and password, make install.  Is there some debconf thing I should do after that?

Sure would be nice if I had the freedom to use this non-free thing within the normal aptitude and repo setup.  Heck, they allow acroread, nvidia, realplayer, etc, etc, but an old version of G-Force is taboo!

Well, I did Dosbox and hplip on my own to get the newer version so I guess I can handle this, but not without some advice.

Sure don't want to mess up Amarok or the visualizations!  It appears to be just substituting a full setup of the same version of libvisual and the plugins, but still things could get tricky.

yeah, ubuntu users suffer from this as well cause ubuntu just pulls debians source packages and recompiles.

i've put together a debian source package which if compiled using the debian method should work fine without causing problems on your system

http://mirror.randumb.org/darkmagez/libvisual/

tho, if you don't manage to find out how to build debian source packages. there's always the slight chance that my x86 ubuntu gutsy binary package will work on your debian system.

http://mirror.randumb.org/darkmagez/lib ... 1_i386.deb

i advise building my debian source package.
failing  getting someone in the debian channel who isn't evil to build it for you
or you could run my gutsy binary (not going to encourage this)

Hey thanks!  I've never built like that but I do have that"The Debian System"  book, as well as the "Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible" so I'm sure they have the directions.

I've downloaded the stuff from your repo.

I actually have OpenSUSE 10.3 installed now, which of course contains perhaps even more visualizations than the official libvisual plugin has.  Don't know but there's a lot of choices in there!

Nice, but I like Debian just as much and may be using that again at some point. 

Couldn't I simply install the dependencies, compile libvisual and the plugins and Amarok and install all the stuff from the official source?  That actually seems easier than building Debian packages.  Sure, they won't be integrated into the apt database as installed applications but they should work just as well. 

Your way seems to be what I was originally looking for, that being just having a package that has it all to install along with the Debian version of Amarok.  But then, like you said, your deb is for Ubuntu and the correct and most likely to succeed method of using what you've got there would be to build a Debian package from the sources.

But if I can compile Amarok, libvisual, and the libvisual plugins (official versions) then as long as I have the dev packages installed for all the required dependencies I should also be fine.

Too bad you didn't have a Debian system to get your package built on Debian.  Then again, I use Lenny (when I do have Debian) so there would be a need for a specific build there as well.

It's great that you have made what you do have there.  Thanks!

It'll be hard to pry myself away from OpenSUSE 10.3.  I was so impressed I ordered the boxed version in gratitude for a great job done.  Everything I've thrown at it has been working nicely.  Lots of improvements and new goodies over 10.2.