2011-04-27

A new Banshee bundle of joy

The release of Banshee 2.0 is already a few weeks behind us, so after a non-negligible delay I'm happy to announce the availability of the Banshee 2.0 bundle for Linux :
Download the file corresponding to your system, uncompress it and run it !
Those files are now compressed with bzip2, so use "tar xjf ..." if you're the command-line type.
You might notice that the files are now hosted on ftp.gnome.org, making this thing look much more serious (and DropBox doesn't seem to be popular these days...).

But that's not the only thing that changed, I've improved several aspects of the bundle :
  • GStreamer integration
    We now use the system-installed GStreamer plugins, from the usual locations (/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10 and /usr/local/lib/gstreamer-0.10). That's why there is now a 64 bit version of the bundle : a 32 bit bundle would run fine on a 64 bit system, but won't be able to load the 64 bit plugin binaries. This means that you should now be able to listen all your music, as long as the proper codecs are available on your system.
  • Theming
    We also try to use the current GTK theme, if there's one available. If there isn't, we use the theme included in the bundle. You can tell the bundle to ignore the current theme by passing the --use-bundled-theme parameter when starting the bundle. We currently only support themes that use the Murrine or Clearlooks engines. If your favorite theme requires another engine, just drop me a line and I'll try to add it.
  • Font handling should be better, as the default configuration files for fontconfig are now included.
  • Navigating to the HTTPS pages on the Amazon store should work, thanks to having the right gio module in the bundle.
  • Various packages have been updated to their latest stable versions, including taglib-sharp, sqlite and libsoup.
  • And of course there's all the goodness that is Banshee 2.0 !
A small gotcha to keep in mind : if you have ever run a previous version of the bundle on your 64 bit system, you'll have to delete the following file : ~/.config-glick/banshee-1/gstreamer-registry.bin
All the changes for the bockbuild build/bundling system are available on my GitHub branch, and maybe soon on the main repository, and you can read more about the way the bundle is built in my previous post.

So go ahead, try it ! You won't break your system !
But if it doesn't work, please file bugs in Bugzilla. Just make sure to mention you're using the Linux bundle, indicate which distro you're using and include any log output.

Update : Modified last paragraph to direct bug reports to Bugzilla.