Banshee's iPod support is based on two subprojects directly related to
Banshee. libipoddevice is a library for providing basic control and
metadata about an iPod. It also ships with a very small command line
utility called "ipod". You can use this to possibly find where the break
in the chain is, and to rule out anything wrong at the Banshee level.
1. Unplug your iPod
2. Open a terminal and run "ipod"
It should then wait, saying "Listening for iPod-specific HAL events..."
3. Plugin iPod and wait, maybe up to a minute. Older udev can be pretty
slow, and the thing has to get mounted and the file system has to be
poked, etc. (however, this whole process only takes about 10 seconds on
my system).
You should see a bunch of iPod properties scroll by at some point after
plugging the device in. If not, you probably have a udev or HAL problem.
4. Try "ipod --list" ... that will confirm nothing is already connected
to the system.
5. Run "hal-device-manager" and scroll through the device tree on the
left to see if there are any nodes similar to the attached screenshot.
If you have no success with those five things above, the problem is not
with libipoddevice or Banshee, rather something lower in your Gentoo
stack, which is usually the case.
One possible thing:
You need Gnome Volume Manager (g-v-m) to actually mount the iPod. That's
the point of g-v-m: it listens to HAL for new devices to mount. If it is
not running, you have to manually manage mounting devices. We could add
some kind of mount policy directly in libipoddevice, but it would not
make much sense. So the whole problem may just be that it's not mounted.
You can look through the advanced properties in the hal-device-manager
tree to find the device node (or look through dmesg) and mount based on
that.
Additionally mounting is best done through pmount/pmount-hal/pumount. I
strongly recommend installing pmount if it is available in Gentoo. g-v-m
will use pmount to do the mounting if it is installed.
Here's a little chart of the layers:
Banshee
|
ipod-sharp
|
libipoddevice
|
HAL --- G-V-M (pmount-hal/pumount)
| \
| D-Bus
|
udev/hotplug
|
kernel
My best guess is you've got a break with HAL/g-v-m. Also, I think I will
turn this mail into a troubleshooting page on the Wiki. It's a fairly
common problem and I have been meaning to do that for a while.
Best,
Aaron
On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 06:59 -0600, Russ Brown wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I came across Banshee today when I noticed it in Portage for the first
> time. Basically I've been looking for an application like this for some
> time, so I'm very excited about having found it.
>
> The ebuild had some dependancy bugs, but I got around them and finally got
> Banshee installed and running fine as a music player.
>
> I'm very impressed. I can see this this is going to turn into an
> application I use every day. It's missing a few functions that I would
> like such as smart playlists, but having looked around a bit I see that
> these things are either planned or in progress, so I'm not worried about
> the project's future.
>
> The problem that I'm having is that I simply can't seem to get my ipod
> working with it. I'm not sure where the problem is: it could be Banshee or
> one of the subprojects, HAL, DBUS or even udev. I'm very technically
> minded, but at this point I'm out of ideas, and so would appreciate any
> pointers that anybody might have that might give me a clue as to what to
> try next.
>
> Some information:
>
> Versions:
>
> Banshee: 0.10
> HAL: 0.5.5.1
> DBUS: DBUS 0.50 (gentoo package 0.50-r1)
> udev: 071
>
> I haven't configured either HAL or DBUS whatsoever (I've not seen any
> documentation telling me to do so) so that could be one simple explanation
> for this.
>
> I can't for the life of me figure out how to get either HAL or DBUS to log
> anything meaningful to the error logs, so I can't post any such
> information. However, I have discovered the utility 'lshal', which when
> run first outputs the following error message a number of times
>
> 8184: arguments to dbus_move_error() were incorrect, assertion "(dest) ==
> NULL || !dbus_error_is_set ((dest))" failed in file dbus-errors.c line 243.
> This is normally a bug in some application using the D-BUS library.
>
> This is followed by a comprehensive list of 91 devices that does not
> appear to include my ipod...
>
> Another potentially related bit of information. In the past, plugging in
> my ipod would normally result in a short message in the dmesg output
> regarding a new USB device. Lately, I seem to get this instead:
>
> ACPI-0292: *** Error: Looking up [PBST] in namespace, AE_ALREADY_EXISTS
> ACPI-0508: *** Error: Method execution failed
> [\_SB_.PCI0.LPC0.BAT1._BST] (Node c17268e0), AE_ALREADY_EXISTS
>
> Again, could be unrelated but at this point I'm willing to clutch at
> straws...
>
> Thanks for reading. If anyone has any tips whatsoever I'd be extremely
> grateful.
>
> Thanks.
>
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