Jorg,

Thanks! I am almost there - when I launch pyxis, I do get all the interactive menus, but when it comes to launching mplayer, it seems to just keep re-starting it over and over and I never get any sound. I have tried installing mplayer from here as well as doing an apt-get install mplayer. Any ideas? I am going to try to manually compile it next, but any tips would be appreciated.

Update: I was running pyxis as root which didnt work. I existed root and ran as user and found that I needed to change the ownership of $HOME/.config/pyxis and its contents to user:users. Once I did this pyxis worked first try. I also just used the compiled myplayer available from this site, so no special compilation required. Thanks so much for this solution - I finally have Howard at work in Doha.