Raaga.com is a very popular online music station that has a very large collection of Indian movie and classical songs. They use real media and they have a player that requires the real media player. Now the default installation of Real Media player will not allow you play music from Raaga.com and the player popup from raaga.com will stay in the 'Initializing Player, Please Wait' and 'Loading' state permanently. There is a simple work around for this situation.

All you have to do is to follow these simple instructions.

1) Download the latest Realplayer from the HelixCommunity.org or from Real.com. We had tested with RealPlayer11Gold.bin. Remember it is the Realplayer and not the Helix Player. The file that we had downloaded and tested was
http://www.real.com/realcom/R?href=http://forms.real.com/real/player/download.html?f=unix/RealPlayer11GOLD.bin. When prompted save the file to your home folder

2) Set the executable bit of the file and then run the installer.

chmod +x RealPlayer11GOLD.bin
sudo ./RealPlayer11GOLD.bin

Proceed with the installation and leave the default options as they are. If all goes well your Real Player will be installed to /opt/real/RealPlayer.

3) However there has been some directory level changes with Firefox 3 which comes with Ubuntu 8.04 and hence the Real Player plugin will not work in Firefox. You can easily fix this problem by running the following commands


cd /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins
sudo ln -s /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.xpt nphelix.xpt
sudo ln -s /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so nphelix.so
sudo mv /usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so ~/.


Now check if the Real Player plugin is installed properly by typing in the following in the Firefox address bar - about:plugins. If you had followed the instructions correctly and you have Ubuntu 8.04 and have used Real Player 11 Gold you should be able to see the following in the about:plugins page

Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible
File name: /usr/local/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so
Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible version 0.4.0.626 built with gcc 3.2.0 on Jul 26 2007

4) Now go to raaga.com and see if the player is working. It should be. Have fun.

If you face any problem while setting up the player or getting it to work, do post your questions as comments and we will try to help you.