songbird doesn't open on ubuntu, 3 processes are strarted with no result

thanks for the workaround! This was driving me nuts ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Wow, thank you. This was straight-forward. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I wouldn't blame Songbird entirely....

I am one of the biggest contributors to Ubuntu Brainstorm, and Canonical can also be blamed for the problem. Canonical blatantly refuses to include songbird in their repository, and they refuse to support a standardised development environment. Furthermore, whilst Redhat is off fixing the kernel for everyone, Ubuntu is off cooking up a Netbook distro (whilst their main distro still has issues). In fact, the head honcho at pulseaudio even officially said that Ubuntu rushed into Pulseaudio without proper testing (which is why there was no shortage of problems)! To what extent should POTI exert themselves to support such an OS, which does not want to be supported (note, eclipse in their repos is 3 years old)? The development and debugging tools on OSX and Windows seem to be a lot nicer (Ubuntu only recently started supporting systemtap for instance).

Further investigations have gone on though, and disabling the Nvidia Opengl library seems to fix the crashes (so it could even be a bug in their implementation, or it might be something else).

That being said, Linux in general is hard to support. Standardisation attempts are failing. Many have tried standardising Pulseaudio for instance, but thanks to some incompatible apps (like flash), users blame pulseaudio and turn it off. Many users then decide to make it more difficult by switching from ALSA to OSS for instance, hampering compatibility further! Even though the LSB for instance decided on standardising RPM support, most distributions have made no attempt to do so. Linux is turning somewhat into a developers nightmare, and supporting linux at the moment, is like supporting 30 different operating systems. Its not made any easier by the fact that some Songbird packages being released also don't work properly.

That's a personal opinion though (I'm not a POTI employee). I run Ubuntu on 2 separate computers, with no problems, so its not a clear-cut bug. Some people are having issues, some aren't (like on Vista, some people were getting DEP issues caused by Divx). Its not always the most obvious party at fault..

Anyway, you'll find POTI are VERY responsive to feedback and bugs, more then any other company I have met, and if there is a problem, they seem to fix it themselves (unlike certain developers, they don't just submit it upstream and hope it gets fixed). The reason I spend so much time supporting them is that they do actually care, and its rare to find a company who cares about their products, and customers so much ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

why WOULD they put it in their repositories? its hardly stable, each release screws up something that was working (album art on 5th gen ipods worked prior to 1.0, broke sense), there seems to be a new DB format each release because your previous profile _never_ works, and the freaking interface can't even be dragged of screen. songbird is a great idea but miserably implemented. instead of focusing on making it the end all be all of iPod apps on linux its just trying to be some multimedia monster of an app and fails miserably.

and you still never make mention as to _why_ a package has to be uninstalled just for songbird to work... that is pathetic. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I tried that first, with no result. I still get one songbird and two songbird-bin processes running, which I have to kill forcefully. So I had to downgrade to 1.2. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

meho_r, you are running into the gstreamer python issue:
more info here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
and here:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show... ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )