How I got to watch Heroes on Ubuntu !

Since I now have a new working Ubuntu install, I decided I’ll watch Heroes on it while “working” on my other machine… Or so I thought.
The graphic card I now have is a S3Trio 3D/2X 8Mo, and I thought I would be on a good run with that one ! Unfortunately any attempt to run a Heroes episode ended up on a window getting killed 🙁

Of course I first thought I was not using the right player, or not having the right codec. So I tried Totem, VLC, MPlayer … No result. So I installed all the codecs I could find … No result. So I decided to run from the command line, and got the fllowing message :

The program 'totem' received an X Window System error.This probably reflects a bug in the program.The error was 'BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)'.(Details: serial 86 error_code 11 request_code 140 minor_code 19)(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful    backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

Simply GREAT !

Some more googling took me to this page, where they tell you to add two more lines to your Xorg.conf file … But I was still in no luck, with the same problem.

At last, I found the following page in the netherlands, where they suggested to use the 16 bits default depth instead of 24 in the Xorg.conf file. So I did, and after a restart of the X server … YATTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA ! There was
Hiro Nakamura !

Now I just need to catch up on 6 episodes 😉