Some More Bytes

I’ve been using Gnome for some time now, and I’m very happy about it. In fact, I am far more happy that I was some weeks ago when I reinstalled Debian Sid with KDE 4. I’ve been always a KDE fan, but KDE 4… it’s just not as polished as KDE3 was, so I decided to switch to Gnome for some time.

However, I have tried some music management/players applications, and although Rhythmbox and Songbird are quite nice, I like Amarok to be my main player.

Amarok is on the official ubuntu repos (Amarok 2), and since it is a a KDE app, you’ll need some KDE libs in your system to execute. For what I have read, it gives some problems in some ubuntu default installations. Avoid them with these simple steps:

• Install the amarok package, and it’s dependencies with your preferred package management tool.

• Make sure that the packages libphonon4, phonon, and phonon-backend-xine are going to be installed. If not, install them manually.

• Install the following packages:


systemsettings, ffmpeg, gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg, libxine1-ffmpeg


• Run systemsettings (the KDE control panel app), and go to Multimedia. Click on the Backend Tab and move xine to the top of the list in case there’s more than one. Click apply.

Now you can start your Amarok2 player from the appz menu, and it should work just fine.