Hi all,
I've tried a number of music players and SnackAmp best fits my needs (it's ugly, but its playlist manager is nice). Alas, I'm having some problems.

I had SnackAmp working just fine, but I'm new with Linux and so I'm trying a ton of different distros. Because of this, I've scratched my HD a number of times since I first had SnackAmp working. Now, I'm back at Mandrake.

When I start SnackAmp, it pops up its small "Initializing" window for about a half-second, and then the app button in the task bar says "[hourglass] Starting SnackAmp..." until it times out and disappears -- the application does not seem to start. I'm not very good at top but as far as I can tell there are no hung or "leftover" processes.

I've tried to un- and reinstall SnackAmp from the Mandrake package manager. I've tried to use the ".SnackAmp" user settings that I had working before, and I've tried to start all afresh. I've even tried to reinstall the entire Mandrake distribution, but all to no avail - the problem persists.

Help!

What's left to try? What other components can I try to un- and reinstall? I hope I don't need to uninstall QT because that would also rip out a fair chuck of (mandatory? vital?) Mandrake control panels and utilities (that's what Mandrake Uninstall warns me, at least).

Maybe this is a user rights issue? I've tried to log in as root and run SnackAmp, and I get the same (non-)result. My regular login is not a member of the "audio" group, because I have absolutely no idea what groups are "proper" for regular users to belong to. (Note to Liunux/Mandrake community -- missing "Users and Groups" howto/faq/guide/intro!)

1) Did you install snackAmp from the Mandrake repositories?

E.G.

urpmi snackAmp

if you had previously set up your urpmi sources as per http://www.zebulon.org.uk/urpmi_en.html

2) Have you tried logging in as root and running snackamp from the command line in a X console window?

This permits you to see error messages which are normally supressed.

Yes, the first thing I do after the install finishes is to set up urpmi so I can put away my cd's. Gawd, how I love being able to pull everything straight from the net.
I'm using the main/updates/contrib sources from sunet.se, and they're working just fine. I'm not using plf (because I'm not clear on whether or not their reason d´être is to circumvent licencing issues, and I want my computer as clean as can be).

No, I hadn't thought of that. As stated, I have tried to start SnackAmp as root, but only graphically.

Thanks for your suggestion, I'll try that as soon as I get a chance and then I'll get back to you.

PLF is pretty good and their stuff is no more unsafe or unsecure than the contrib sources.

Except for the CSS libs, PLF nicely rounds out the Contrib stuff, usually adding enhancements and updates for files that while are tried and true, require some form of Mandrakification.

I haven't had any problems with anything from there destroying or adversely affecting a system.

Right, I tried to start SnacKAmp from a shell, and it gave me about a screenful of output.
Most of it, as far as I am able to tell, is just status information; however there were some warnings about "saLog". I could not find any such file, or even a reference to it, on my hard drive.

Thus, I decided to start all over again, and reinstalled Mandrake from the ground up. I love how you can keep your /home partition and such, and keep all of your user settings. And given my success with all my experimentation, I've become rather deft at reinstalling Mandrake in a heartbeat (okay, a few heartbeats then, but it definitely doesn't get my pulse up).

So -- it's working again. End of story.
I appreciate your help, even if I'm too impatient to correct these things the meticulous way.

Great!

Urpmi tries to keep your system consistent and operational.

Unfortunately manual compiles and installs can break things which may cause groups of applications to fail.

Re-installing restored your system to a consistent state.

Stick with the repositories when possible and Mandrake does a great job.

Since almost everything is already available in the repositories anyway, this is easy to do.

The only thing I have ever, since I started with Linux, installed without using urpmi is Mozilla (because I need v1.8a4, not v1.6). Because of that, I've also had to manually install Java J2RE, or I would have no Java in Mozilla.

Everything else I take from urpmi, so I'm not sure how that should introduce corruptness. Anyhow, it's working now, and I expect it to continue to do so.

[edit: typo]

It's not usually a "corruptness" issue, rather that some update or software has introduced something that can cause other applications to fail.

Bear in mind that URPMI is not immune from this as well but it does a better job than an individual can in trying to keep things straight.

Wouldn't you believe, it's doing it again. I was just playing a file (it has been working, I've played a number of tunes today), and all of a sudden it stopped responding. The CPU monitor went to the roof, with a process called "wish" that I could only stop by rebooting. Since that reboot, I'm back to sqare 1 (and this time, I'm not reinstalling).

What is "wish"? Is it even related to SnackAmp?

I've tried to install XMMS and have that play my files, but that crashes as well (when pressing Play, the title begins to scroll, but no sound, and no time progress; then XMMS crashes a few seconds later). Perhaps there is a problem with my music files?

I'm using Grip to convert my cd's to Ogg Vorbis, but I'm willing to use FLAC (in spite of an even lower number of compatible players). I'd rather not use MP3 or some of the other lossy formats. Also, I'd like to use a player that is media library-centric, and this one does it just as well as MS Media Player (which admittedly is rather excellent in that respect). XMMS et al are just too single-file-centric, and RhythmBox seems somehow to only "get it" halfway. Am I making sense?

Anyhow, when I start SnackAmp from a root terminal, this is what I get:

Code:

[root@klaymen]# /usr/bin/snackAmp
Error in startup script: invalid command name "saLog"
    while executing
"saLog "Using default IP address for [info hostname]""
    (procedure "myIP" line 13)
    invoked from within
"myIP"
    (in namespace eval "::iptools" script line 53)
    invoked from within
"namespace eval iptools {
   proc myIP {args} {
        # find out localhost's IP address
        # courtesy David Gravereaux, Heribert Dahms
        for {set ..."
    (file "/usr/lib/snackAmp/lib/gpUtils.tcl" line 837)
    invoked from within
"source /usr/lib/snackAmp/lib/gpUtils.tcl"
    ("package ifneeded" script)
    invoked from within
"package require gpUtils"
    (file "/usr/bin/snackAmp" line 485)

As before, there's no trace of "saLog" anywhere. Why it's trying so hard to get my IP is beyond me, it's just a local player (well okay, it can act as a server, so maybe that's why).

Any suggestions are very welcome.

saLog is a tcl/tk function defined in the other files of the /usr/lib/snackAmp/lib directory.

You may want to

urpmi tcl

and tk

wish

( next time try "whatis wish" ) is a windowing shell that is probably being used to launch subprocesses or threads.

My, do you ever go away? Or are you the resident LinuxQuestions daemon?

Hmm. I feel like such a newbie ... utterly helpless.

Tell you what, I'm going to bed. Maybe (just maybe) this will all have gone away in the morning. Or not.

Re: Go away.

This darn board e-mails me every time there is a new post so I end up answering constantly. I may have to turn this off.

Re: snackAmp

If it was working but suddenly stopped it may be due to snackAmp having left an orphaned process running.

Sometimes this may happen for no good reason.

The problem is that you have to determine which process is to blame.

The easiest way to do this is to reboot and log back in.

Then open a console window, su to root and type in

ps -ax

Then run snackAmp seperately.

Keep running it until it fails again, then in another window perform another

ps -ax

now compare the two windows.

The difference between the two will give you the errant process which you must kill off.

BTW: also kill off any "session" processes which KDE loves to recreate.

To kill off a process look at it's ID number on the left.

Then type in

kill -s 9 IDNUMBER_OF_PROCESS

Hi again. Ive now run "ps -ax" before and after running SnackAmp, and noted the differences. There does not seem to be any related processes...
Here are the items from the after-snapshot that differred from the before-snapshot. There are no new additions, only changes. There are a ton of things that did not change, I've lft those out.
Just for reference, here are the original values:
Don't reply just yet; I want to try a few more things, but don't have the time for it.
Later!

Do you see all of those -session entries followed by numbers?

KDE attempts to save the state of all your running applications when it is shut down or you log out.

When you log back in it is supposed to restart those apps for you. However often it doesn't and leaves orphaned processes running on your system.

In this case you even have a mixer app, which can take over audio, running in the background.

Go into the KDE control center and click on "components/session manager" and put checks in front of
"start with an empty session".

Log out and back in again after closing everything down.

Now ps -ax again as you did before.

NOTE the pid number for every entry which contains -session followed by a bunch of numbers.

KILL OFF each one with a signal 9.

E.G. as per your example

kill -s 9 2370 2389 2390

(and maybe even 2370)

These are "orphans", allocating resouces and eating up memory needlessly. They also can grab the sound interface away from you.

GKRELLM can do this if you have it set to use any of it's sound related plugins.

Anyway assuming you haven't forced yourself to log out, now try running SnackAmp.

Ok, now this is beginning to tick me off ... I've done as you said, and ended up with a ps -ax with no "-session" entries. I've restarted my computer and logged in, starting only the two command shells I'd need (no gkrellm or anything else (apart from the normal KDE bits)).
Snack still refuses to launch, or even leave a trace.
Just for kicks, I tried "man ogg123", learned that, and then played an Eagles track from the shell. No problem there. Rebooted, tried again, same result. I'm sorry to say this, but either I'm a total dork at this, or there was nothing to "kill", yet Snack still does not budge. Argh!

One thing's for certain, it's not because of your lack of trying, and I won't ask you to persist. Alas, the SnackAmp home page does not offer much help, so I'm beginning to think SnackAmp is perhaps not the best solution after all ... what do you use for a music library? Anyway, I'm looking at some other apps as well now.