Is there really no way at all to install Windows Media Player 10 on Windows 98 ?
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Probably not. Really doubtful in fact.

Why are you still using 98SE?
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I run 2 hard drives in my box; one with Linux on it, the other with Windows on it,
and I switch the bus cable between the two, according to which system I need to use.

I usually use the Linux hd, but it konked out on me a while ago.

I live in a fairly remote area, and I don't have access to good deals on hardware,
and it's mostly a matter of getting ripped off or nothing.
So, until I can find a hd at a decent price, I'll have to use the Windows hd.

I usually listened to web radio stations with Linux apps, but now with Windows MP and/or RealPlayer,
and/or whatever... streaming media servers require constant upgrading to the latest media players.

And I need to upgrade to WMP v10, and it won't install on Win98.

Ain't no way I'm gonna fork out hundreds of bucks for WinXP, since I'll be going back to Linux as soon as I can.

But until that happens, I'd like to use WMP v10, and I was hoping there might be a workaround to installing it on Win98se.
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Mud, if you live in the United States, just go to zipzoomfly.com , they have very good prices, ship fast, and usually free. A smallish hard drive will cost you maybe $50 or so, and will be at your door a few days after you order it, unless you live somewhere really odd like the middle of alaska or something.

I'm not sure why you went through all the trouble of swapping cables, linux grub handles dual booting really easily, most distros will autodetect your windows drive and add that to the boot option menu, or if they don't, you can add it yourself in Linux.

If you usually listened to media on linux, I'm not at all clear on why you'd even want to install windowsmedia player 10, why not just go with something like winamp 3, or 5, with the added wma/wmv codecs? That's a lot smaller, and will install fine. I never use real or wmp if I can help it, too annoying.

As you can see from the windows media player requirements:

This means that windows media player 10 uses Windows XP exclusive APIs to function, you can't even run it on windows 2000 or ME. No loss as far as I'm concerned, I never use it, winamp 2.9 or 3.0 are my favorites, small, non-bloated, 5.0 was released just when AOL was dismantling the Winamp team, spirits, and coding, weren't at a high level at that point, it's just a bloated gui...

oh, and welcome to the forums mud
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Something like that, only more so.

I really don't want both OS's on the same drive.
Call it paranoia.


The radio station I want requires WMP.



Yeah, looks like it, but one always hopes that some clever cracker might have found a way, but... oh well...


Thanks jeffd, I appreciate :-)
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There's no need to use that cable swapping stuff, one hard drive has windows, with its partitions, one linux, with its partitions.

Install windows first. Then install linux. Linux detects windows fine, adds it to boot loader, boot loader overwrites windows boot loader.

Easy as can be, much more reliable too than swapping cables, that is going to break the connections over time.

There's no need to use windows media player 10, you can use 7, 8 or 9, they all work fine.

Or you can use wma/wmv codecs for winamp, winamp 5 and 3 I think both come with those, they work fine.

Or if you must have windows media player, you can download wmp 9 here. That supports Windows 98 SE. By the way, that page has all the old versions, along with which Windows they support.

"one always hopes that some clever cracker might have found a way"

I assume player 10 is using APIs that are XP specific, you'd have to install whatever libraries / dlls etc that would support them, then you'd have to install those dependencies, and boom, failed system.

That's my guess anyway.

I suspect the clever crackers are more interested in XP activation stuff than windows 98 se tweaks at this point.

XP has a lot of real consumer media junk on it, that's probably tied in directly to wmp 10. I like 7 personally, it's a real program, stand alone. 8 will play almost anything if I remember right. And winamp with the right plugins will play windows media format no problem.
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True, but I use Linux most of the time, so there's very little cable swapping going on. I switch to Windows pretty much only when I need to use PhotoShop; and that doesn't happen very often.



Yep! I am using WMP v9 now, only the wascally radio stn I've been listening to changed server and now it demands WMP v10 only.


"Depressing, isn't it?" as Marvin would say.


Yes.
Maybe I'll just take up a second mortgage on my house and buy a new hd at my friendly local trading post :-(
and fire up Linux again.
In the last couple of weeks I downloaded and burned just about every latest distros there are out there.
I think I'll try FreeBSD.
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try kanotix if you haven't tried it yet, that's an interesting one. Although you might want to wait for the next release, he's on 2005-3 right now, switchover between kde libraries are causing some apt update problems.

FreeBSD sounds interesting too, you can run linux stuff on it fine I think, you just have to tell it to install the linux libaries on install.

But cable swapping, that's completely unnecessary, either grub or lilo linux bootloaders can easily handle booting any windows, and it's really easy, just select which os from boot menu on boot, that's how to do it, it's much easier.
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Yes. It's actually UNIX, and Linux is as close to UNIX I ever got.
So it should be interesting and a bit different.


No doubt, but I still feel very uncomfortable having both OS's on the same hd.
Kinda like putting a dog and a cat in the same cage :-)

I read a blurb recently that the average hd lasts about 5 years.
I wonder if there are some "special" hd's that will last much longer.
Like one for a heavy duty server... or something... ???
Waddya think?
This is now the 2nd time a hd craps out on me, and the first time was very costly.
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I'm telling you, this is a dead giveaway, bad cables, that's the only thing that's ever caused repeated hard drive failures in my experience.

I've multibooted for years, it doesn't matter.

Plus, it also doesn't matter what configuration you have, you can have this:

/hda1 = linux swap
/hda2 = linux /
/hda3 = linux /home

plus drive 2
/hdb1 = windows c:
/hdb2 = windows d:

or any mix, it doesn't matter at all.

The partitions simply do not interact with each other. Plus, the real advantage, if you run windows 98, is that you can read and write to the fat32 windows partitions, which means you can share data cross os, which makes running two os'es much more pleasant.

The bootloader controls all the hard drives, doesn't matter the configuration, linux boot loaders are really stable.

So if you have the above, grub or lilo is installed on the active drive boot sector, you boot, and get the os of your choice.

My guess is that you are getting these disk failure because you are swapping cables. That stuff really isn't meant to be plugged in and unplugged, once a cable goes slightly bad, you can almost not detect the errors, you just disk failures, that happened to me, took me 3 hard drives before I figured it out. That's the only drives I've lost too.

Other no nos are putting a hard drive and cdrom/dvd rom on the same ide channel, that's goiing to cause issues over time from my experience.

Re freeBSD, if I was going to run a server, host a website, my top choice is freeBSD, but for more desktop oriented stuff, I'd have to go with linux kernel running kde, there's just too many devices coming out that the linux kernel can now handle natively, usb drives comes to mind, and freebsd, because it's primary function is being a rock solid server os, just doesn't need to have support for.

Plus you'll be running the linux support stuff on freebsd anyway, to me, might as well just linux. Linux desktop, while still not user friendly, and still lacking too much support for too much stuff, is getting a lot better, every 6 months it's noticeably improved.
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