Linux ONLY: Internal Dataflow Error.

G'day,

Actually, developing for Linux isn't as easy as one would expect. I don't think its that Linux is being shafted, its just that whilst every developer LOVES the idea of Linux, it does take significantly more resources to perfect Linux support then OSX or Windows. I know this first hand, because in the past I developed a program known as Driver On Demand (which was apparently mentioned in an article by Jono Bacon and made Linux Format printed magazine) . The project fell apart because no distributions wanted to work together, and at the end, there was little chance it would succeed. Its all about cost/benefits.

In fact, most popular distributions don't even comply with the Linux standard Base (it dictates that distributions must support RPM for instance, and clearly, they don't support it at all). When you develop for Windows or OSX, you are developing for a few different versions of a single operating system, which barely changes over 2 years. But when you develop for Linux, you are developing for MANY completely different distributions, all of which often use different libraries, compilers and base libraries, different GUI environments, packaging systems and their own special patches to almost every package.

Many distro's have major updates every 6 months, where daemons and other major components are changed (all without a centralised development centre and mailing list which pre-warns developers about changes they should be aware of in advance). Whilst Apple and Microsoft gives us ages to test, with Linux, its a surprise (even to the maintainers as they rarely work upstream and so are unaware of future plans).

What's even worse is that community members often believe they know better, and will swap system libraries and daemons, de-standardising things further. A lot of people are disabling pulseaudio currently because they think they will save 1% CPU, and there are probably more compiling their own kernels and disabling every module except the ones they use because they think it will magically make linux faster. At the moment, it simply makes more sense to complete the basic foundation and then later clean up the issues a small number of people have. Its about maximising the gain :)

In terms of your MP3 problem, in Ubuntu, MP3's were working fine for me. A few suggestions are:
1) Try to use the official .tar.gz. If this doesn't work, look around for an OpenSuse package (if Songbird required special fixes, its possible there are packages which fix them).
2) Delete the songbird settings (located under ~/.Songbird*)
3) Try again with Songbird 1.3 / Jackson 5. This will probably be released VERY VERY soon (within 1 week).
4) Or it could be caused by an incompatibility problem, in which case, the best course of action would be to send a bug report. Please use the Guidelines on writing a good bug to maximise the chances the bug will be handled quickly.

Its worth noting that the error messages I am seeing there are actually quite normal (they showed in Ubuntu too). It may help to take a look at the Songbird Error Console too (located under the tools menu), after playing an MP3.

Unfortunately, that's the only help I can provide. Hope it helps...
Andrew

PS. Btw, I'm an unpaid community member, not a developer, so these are exclusively my opinions. POTI may have different opinions about Linux ;)