AmaroK, KDE, FC3 Crashes galore
 

I have 3 linux boxes currently. Each is based on the nforce2 chipset, each with the nvidia drivers for graphics, sound, and networking installed and working. I have 2 of them running FC3 and one running Suse 9.1.

Each is using the latest kernel for each available distro (as they are made available through the distro). Each plays movies, music, CDs, divx through various programs such as mplayer, xine player, kaffeine without any problems.

I compiled amarok 1.2.3 and 1.2.4 and have the gst engine installed.

During my use of amarok the program seems to crash with as much frequency as my heart beats until I randomly seem to get a song to play. After I manage to get a song to play all others play fine without any problems no matter what I do.

When I quit Amarok and restart it and try to play another song amarok begins its regular crashing.

Sometimes the crash results in the program prompting me to send the results to the developers about why it crashed. Other times it just crashes to the desktop without providing a single message as to what happened.

As I said, once I get amarok to play one song it will continue to play all/any others that I ask it to play. All featuers seem to work without fail. But when I start or try to restart it crashes. I have to keep trying repeatedly after each crash to get it to play until I find a song it will play.

I have gst, arts, and alsa installed and updated via synaptic and various repositories as well as compared them to the files found on redhats repositories.

I went into the control center and turned off sound events. This seems to have helped and when I use the "soundcard detection" program I seem to have better results getting a song to play.

Here's the question. Is FC3's implementation of the sound system in their customized KDE 3.x a known problem? It seems that the fedora project has had a very difficult time getting sound to function properly in the environment.

In the past I have had to turn off the sound system in FC3 through the control panel to get things to work properly.

I have tried this on the two boxes that have FC3 installed and both exhibit the same probelms. The suse box has problems but not as many.

Any ideas on what is causing amarok to just crash hard? Any ideas why it keeps crashing back to the desktop without telling me that it crashed and why?

Attempting to ask for help at the amarok forums results in the admin attacking those asking questions, literally. He's been offensive and abusive in his replies and makes anyone questioning the cause feel alienated.

Any help would be appreciated.

Someone has to have some idea of what's going on here. It's impossible that I would have this issue on so many computers using such a popular program.

Ideas, anyone?

I seem to have a similar problem. I think arts may be causing all the hassel..

Anyone?

Here's what I have found. Since I asked for answers I thought it would be respectful of everyone that has even read the post for me to come here and describe what I found.

Aside from the rudeness that many people received after reporting problems at amarok.kde.org I think the program is gorgeous and deserves much praise. Maybe that's why we all seem to be upset at such responses from the admin at that site.

I went back and started checking my various libraries. I checked taglib, musicbrainz, and gstreamer. I also looked at the versions of arts and alsa that I had on my system.

The problem I had with having the library files being out of date and causing the problem is that it didn't matter which engine I chose, I got the same results--crashes galore.

I checked some of these out anyway and found that the basic repositories I draw from (dag, ayo, etc) gave me certain versions of these files. In the case of gstreamer I decided to see if there was a homepage for the author of this. When I located it they listed apt repository references which I then added and corrected for my version of FC.

When I did this I found that almost every single version of gstreamer was out of date. I had every package related to gstreamer that I could find installed.

I updated gstreamer and every other possible package from that site and rebooted my computer.

I'll let you know over the next few days whether this is the solution. The fact that the timer for each song never used to count down and the progress slider for the songs never slid, and that it does so now is a good sign.

I still think the problem is with amarok in that they aren't doing enough checking to ensure that the program doesn't crash. They just give control to those libraries and let them roll. When an error occurs they have no control so they can't resport them. It would behoove them to start trapping these errors and to document which libraries are the best for use with amarok.

Fill me in if this helps you...I may do the same.

Thanks :)

All my problems seem to have disappeared. Even though the problem manifest itself with the other engines the upgrading of gstreamer to 0.8.10-0.gst.1.3 (from the gstreamer home page using the apt repository) did the trick.

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download/

If you are using FC3 you will need to adjust the APT repository reference changing the /2/ to /3/

rpm http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/pkg/ fedora/3/i386 deps gst
rpm-src http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/pkg/ fedora/3/i386 deps gst

With this working correctly it puts a much more positive face on linux. This most certainly is not a gstreamer problem in my opinion. This is clearly, from my experience as a programmer, the direct fault of the amarok development guys. They are not testing for the correct version installed on your system when you compile it, they are not documenting on their site the versions of the libraries they used in their development, and they are absolutely not trapping for these types of errors. So, they have a documentation error, an installation error, and alot of programming errors. In the end they have an attitude problem as well, so be forewarned, beauty doesn't meant there isn't a beast below the surface.

This was the solution to my problem http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...34#post1666334

Amarok was not the problem (that I know of...maybe it was?)..nor gstreamer..it was KDE (not sure which program was causing the trouble though).

What I did..what updated to a CVS version of kdemultimedia, and a CVS version of amarok. Everything is running great now.

No more problems!

-edit

I just re-read your post..and I think what you said is absolutely correct. Things work now, because they are both CVS versions. Amarok must have been using incorrect versions of the required libraries. Odd...and I'm still not sure if it was Amarok or Arts...but everything is running great...finally.

AmaroK under FC4: mixed results
 

I just found this post in a search and I read it with great interest because I have been trying to get AmaroK working under Fedora with mixed results.

To begin with, I recently updated my laptop from Core 2 to Core 4 and my desktop from Core 3 to Core 4. On my laptop, AmaroK runs fine; on my desktop it crashes constantly, both under Gnome (which I normally use) and KDE.

I stopped by the AmaroK IRC channel the other day, but the person I spoke wasn't so helpful; he just said that there had been a lot of problems with the program under FC4 and he blamed it on GCC v4. However, this doesn't explain why it does work on my laptop and why it crashed on my desktop system under FC3.

After reading the messages above, I checked which kdemultimedia packages I had installed, a lo and behold the one on my desktop was rather out of date, so I installed the same version that was on the laptop. I've likewise brought all the gstream packages up to date, all to no avail; now, KDE apps like JuK seem more unstable than ever, with a lot of those SIGSEGV errors. Clearly, there are some package incompatibilities, but it is fiendishly difficult to figure out where.

I tried compiling a CVS version of AmaroK, but it is hardwired not to compile with v4 of GCC.

Anyone have any idea what packages, besides gstreamer, amarok, and kdemultimedia, might be causing problems? I'd really like to get AmaroK working on my desktop system, where I have most of my music files, as it is the best media player I've yet seen for Linux.