[Rhythmbox-devel] gentoo installation problems

[Derrick Ashby <derrick_ashby ozemail com au>]

Hello folks,

Since I last posted I have  installed gentoo linux on my new linux 
desktop machine. I found that version 0.6.1 was the latest Rhythmbox 
version that was available via the gentoo portage packaging system. I 
installed that. Being forced to compile my own kernel (a new 
experience), I had opted to install the ALSA sound system. I found that 
rhythmbox wouldn't work at all. Modifying the kernel to introduce the 
ALSA OSS wrapper didn't help much. In order to get Rhythmbox to make any 
sounds at all I found I had to disable the KDE system sounds.

I discovered that rhythmbox 0.6.8 was available via portage, except that 
it was masked (gentoo reckoned it was unstable :-( ) , so I installed 
that. This seemed a mistake because now it didn't make any difference 
whether I disabled KDE sounds or not, the previous OSS error had come 
back. It seemed that the problem was likely to be gstreamer not 
supporting ALSA, so I recompiled rhythmbox to use xine. This did the 
trick, I could now play music and system sounds.

I guess all these problems were more to do with gstreamer than rhythmbox 
(gstreamer is at version 0.6.4 on gentoo). I'm not keen to install 
anything straight from tarball until I'm more familiar with the gentoo 
way of doing things via portage, so I'm stuck with 0.6.8 until an ebuild 
for a newer version emerges, or I work out how to write one myself. My 
question is can I get gstreamer to play nicely with ALSA using version 
0.6.4?

I generally set the player to shuffle but not repeat, but I have to 
report that it repeats anyway. I guess you already know that, and it's 
fixed in versions later than the one I'm playing with?