Crossing Over

Through the recommendation of my brother, I’ve installed Banshee Music Player on my Ubuntu PC in my long running effort to find the *perfect* Ubuntu media player.  Installation was as easy as installing most other software items.  Simply go to the Add/Remove Programs option on your Applications menu and search for Banshee in the “All available applications” option.  Click on the check box and apply.

After installing, I set it up to recognize my library and waited patiently.  It took a good 30-45 mins for it to load my 120+ GB music library, so no details as of yet on its actual usefulness.

Looking over the product tour, it looks as though they manage to cover all the bases.  It has the capability to import songs to MP3 format, burn CDs and sync your iPod all built in so that you don’t have to hunt down a ridiculous pile of codecs (like Amarok or Rhythmbox).  It also seems to have the features that an iTunes convert is looking for like drag-and-drop playlist and smart playlist support, play counters and ratings.  The only thing I haven’t seen so far is Artist/Album filters to sort my music, although there is a search box available so you can type your search information in there.

Later on we’ll have some details on its functionality.

Back when i thought i had more time I asked Brenda at Brain-Confetti to make me a Feisty Fawn logo for this blog.  I had intended to incorporate it into the template here, but WordPress templates are notoriously pain-in-the-ass-ish to muck around with.  Shoulda gone with blogger or Movable Type I suppose.  Working two jobs prevents me from doing anything useful.

Get it - Feisty Fawn.  Brenda rocks!

So, after the upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon, it seems to me that everything is working a little bit better.  I noticed that WINE was working properly, so I gave another try at installing iTunes, with much success…

To say that it works well… would be a lie.  It works, but barely.  It’s extraordinarily slow and every time I launch it my screen goes black for about 5-10 seconds.  So three cheers for a proof-of-concept installation, but unfortunately I’ll be sticking with other options until some kinks can be worked out.

Okay, so fixing the Pidgin problem was a lot easier than expected.  A quick Google search yielded the following forum result…

Go to Synaptic and search for SSL then selected: libnss3-dev, libnss3-tools and libnss3-0d (it might be installed already thie one). Then after installing those, search for pidgin and reinstall it, that should do it.

Thanks big time madelman.

I got the software update notice this morning that there was an Ubuntu upgrade available for me.  I clicked the software update thing, told it I wanted to install the upgrade and away it went…

The upgrade was pretty easy, though quite far from quick.  Several times during the day the install was interrupted by some prompt and I’d have to click “Forward” or something to that effect.  Certainly nothing involving brain power, but it would have been nice to just be able to leave it alone.

After the upgrade to 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon was done, I rebooted my system, logged in and gave it a go.

The desktop effects are much improved and functional.  No weird crashes when trying to run them this time, and also WINE seems to have reinstalled and corrected itself into working properly (there were no icons for anything WINE related before).

There is one major problem so far - the upgrade to Gusty Gibbon broke my install of Pidgin Instant Messenger.  I get error messages telling me that I need to install some SSL libraries or something.  I ran into this problem on my windows computer when I wanted to use Miranda IM to connect to GoogleTalk.  I’m sure there’s a fix for it on Ubuntu, I’m gonna have to look for it though.

So I’ve been told that running a large number of windows applications can be easy using WINE on your linux PC.

Apparently iTunes is not necessarily one of these easy running applications.

As a matter of fact, I can’t seem to get past the halfway point in the installation process.

As you can see in the screen, everything seems to be able to get in the half-way point really well, but that’s aboot where it stops.  Three or four failed attempts leads me to believe that I should just stick with Amarok for now.

Over at Mike’s Ubuntu blog there’s a post about getting iTunes running on Ubuntu using WINE. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for this one. I’ve been using Amarok and Songbird largely to handle my iPod file transfers, but their functionality and stability are severely lacking.

I started the installation process this morning before work.  The steps for installing WINE worked perfectly and quickly while I was downloading the iTunes install file.  Once the install file was downloading, I used the WINE file browser to navigate to it, double clicked on the file and watched as iTunes began to install.

Then I waited.

and waited..

and waited…

I gave up waiting as the installation status bar stuck at the halfway mark or so.  Here’s to hoping that when I go home the installation will have finished.  I’ll run through it again with some screen shots tonight when I have more time.

When you install Ubuntu 7.04 an Instant Messaging program called GAIM gets installed on your computer as well.  It’s a pretty handy multi-protocol application that will let you connect to various IM programs (MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ).  The only problem for me is that there is no built-in support for GoogleTalk.

A little bit of research led me to find that GAIM has been renamed to Pidgin for various legal reasons and Pidgin now has support for Googletalk’s protocol.  The down side is that Pidgin does not currently exist in the Add/Remove programs library.  A quick google search led me to jhcore.com’s article about installing Pidgin on your Ubuntu machine.  The instructions do use command line, but are actually very easy to use.

The only issue I found is that they’re slightly out of date, referring to a slightly outdated version of pidgin.  The good news is that by swapping the version number that is shown in jhcore’s instructions for the current version, you get the most up to date install of the application.

So what happened to make my iPod Nano crash after loading the music onto it using AmaroK?  I’m not 100% sure, but I do know that it had to do with certain songs on certain playlists.  I know that there was some sort of issue with a Misfits playlist I had created (I love the boxed set they released a few years back by the way).  It would play just fine within AmaroK, but whenever I used AmaroK to load it onto my iPod, it seems that those particular tracks caused the iPod to crash.  Workaround:  delete the tracks from the iPod and listen to something else.

Yeah, it’s a sucky workaround, but until I know the actual reason as to why those specific tracks caused the crash, I’ll either have to avoid them or load them using iTunes.  And since I’m avoiding Windows XP like the plague, looks like I’m avoiding them for now.

The good news is that after deleting the tracks from my iPod I can now use the “Shuffle Songs” option again.  I’ll have to see if there’s some sort of plugin for Amarok that does some sort of error checking or something like that.

Posting to the AmaroK forum yielded little in the way of results, although I didn’t get anything in the way of sarcastic replies.  The only response I managed to get was “You should call Apple support.”

The downside is that if I call apple support they will say “use iTunes on Windows or OSX - we don’t support Linux in any way, shape or form.  Even Ubuntu” and I KNOW I don’t have problems when I use iTunes on Windows XP to load the music.

I’m going to try uninstalling and reinstalling AmaroK tonight.  With all of the problems I’ve had in trying to get it to work properly, that may have screwed something up.  The good news is that I know the fast and easy way to install MP3 support in AmaroK so this won’t be another adventure in futility.

Also, the good news is that Songbird DOES work for me, it’s just incredibly slow.  And as much as it sucks to have a music application that’s slow, it sucks even more to have one that doesn’t work.