Through Twitter, I was introduced to an amazing project called “gPodder“.  It’s a podcast receiver/catcher written in Python utilizing PyGTK (for its GUI).  It supports Linux and FreeBSD.  The amazing thing about it is, I was looking for a podcast catcher just a few days earlier and I was totally lost.  My keywords were just all over the place and I ended up with results that were totally left field.  I think the keyword would be “catcher” or “receiver”.  I’ve used Amarok and Banshee, but I could never figure out how to sync with my Blackberry.

Well a friend of mine tweeted someone on Twitter about Banshee so I started following the other person.  And luckily for me about a day later that guy tweeted about gPodder.  I jumped on it and I’ve been happy ever since.  Thank you Web 2.0 – you really work!

So last night I finally decided to upgrade my home desktop from Fedora 8: Werewolf (best name ever) to Fedora 9: Sulphur. My main reasoning was to get Banshee 1.0 installed and have a happier podcasting life. Lukily for me I have a seperate partition to store my data and I backed up my /home directory. Not all the files just the ones I thought were important, which included most of the [dot][files/folders].

I had a headache that night too, but I was determined to get this newer version running. After I took care of my family duties (kids, wife, blah blah) – I jumped on my machine and verified the ISO file I downloaded about a week after the release of Sulphur. Everything went well, I burned it to a DVD at 2.4x speed. Awh did it hurt to click “Burn” at that speed, but I found other stuff to do. Once it was finished I rebooted and started the process.

It took a long time to upgrade, so I went downstairs and watched some South Park with my brother. It was around 1:00 AM when I decided to go to bed. The process was almost finished, but I didn’t have any energy left to complete the process.

In the morning I saw the beautiful “congratulations” screen and rebooted the machine. The first thing that shows you something is wrong is I didn’t get a neat little splash screen while the processes were loading. I’ve learned that that has something to do with Xserver. It then tried to give me a login screen, but kept blinking out. I clicked the <ENTER> key and I saw a text login. All signs that Xserver is not running. I logged in, typed “startx”, waited, and recieved this error message:

giving up
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to Xserver
xinit: No such process (errno 3): server error.

Yah, no one likes to see those kind of messages. I’m researching it now on Fedora Forums. I do have a nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card AND I am using their propritary drivers (no luck with Lvina). So stay tuned for more adventures in me messing things up!

I am experiencing a deafening silience when it comes to the audio on my Fedora box.  As of this article being published I can not hear audio playing on my computer.  Such as:

• MP3s, Oggs
• YouTube, Hulu, and Flash-based player

Ironically when I do a “Soundcard Detection” it does find it, I hear the test audio.  I can even hear my recording that I just created in Audacity.  I am at a lotal lost.

Banshee 1.0

I think it started when I tried to install the lastest rave of audio players, Banshee 1.0.  I’m running Fedora 8, I’m a linux noob, so I checked my respositories and it had a version 0.13.  YUM search, YUM install all produced a non-1.0 version.  So; I downloaded the source file and tried to ./configure, make, make install.  Not to my surprise I had a dependency issue.  I did a search in my program manager and then google.com for any direction.  I’d find the library file and install THAT from source.  For the next hour or so it was rince and repeat.  Evey time I executed ./configure, I kept falling into a depenency issue.

For some of them I installed by source, but Fedora still didn’t recognize that it was installed.

Over the past couple of months – I’ve picked up that any library or program that comes stock with the distro you will find in /usr folder.  Anything you install afterwards should go into the /usr/local folder.  In there it has a “src”, “share”, and a “lib” folder.  So I could move my source files to /usr/local/src and compile them from there.  I would also install precomipled programs, such as Fire fox into the /usr/local/share/applications folder.

Well basically the system wouldn’t look into the /usr/local/lib folder to see that library I just install resides there.  I ended up on my LUG’s mailing list for some answers.  They pointed me into the right direction, but I STILL had other dependency issues.  It was not a pretty site.  Ironically; my older IBM Thinkpad R40 laptop is running Fedora 9 and I did “YUM install banshee” and it installed version 1.0 without any issues.  Hmmm, I might need to upgrade my desktop.

Overall; YUM seems to be a better route of installing programs, I just need to understand how to work it.  I still haven’t figured out the problem – I don’t know where to start.  This sucks!