How to install VLC player with a GUI

Published on July 11th, 2006 in Gentoo

After my last Gentoo box update, VLC was updated, too. I remembered that VLC doesn’t come with a GUI by default, so I had to take the exact same steps as the first time, because it wouldn’t work this time out of the box either. This is kind of annoying. Anyway, here are the steps you have to take if you encounter the same problem:

First of all, set the use flag for wxGTK: echo “x11-libs/wxGTK unicode” >> /etc/portage/package.use

Then emerge (or re-emerge it, if it was installed before): emerge -av x11-libs/wxGTK

Unmask VLC: echo “media-video/vlc ~x86″ >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

VLC comes with a tremendous amount of options you can set, we’ll use a list of the most common ones: echo “media-video/vlc X a52 alsa dts dvd ffmpeg mp3 mpeg win32codecs ncurses opengl sdl skins truetype wxwindows xv” >> /etc/portage/package.use

Now that we have set all required flags, the last step is to emerge VLC: emerge -av vlc

Shout it out!