Integrate Songbird into Solaris
After some trivial changes to the source code, Songbird 0.5 has been built on Solaris SPARC b76 with Sun Studio 11 successfully by using the Songbird SFE spec. I've tried the tarball and pkgadd binaries on my SPARC b80 box. It works fine:) Thanks a lot to the Songbird guys(especially stevel and preed) on hosting the x86 builds and SPARC builds(tarball/pkgadd) for Songbird 0.5.
Is Songbird ready to be delivered into Solaris Nevada?
- The license issue has been sorted out. We won't link XULRunner with flash plugin by default. FYI, this is just a walk around for Songbird+XULRunner+flash plugin. We'd still hope that Songbird could re-license for this combination.
- Rhythmbox has just been re-licensed. That's to say, Solaris can ship it with mp3 decoder now. But we're still waiting for the status of sound-juicer and gnome-sound-recorder who also use gstreamer+mp3 decoder. Only when all of these are resolved, we can put mp3 decoder back into Solaris Nevada.
- Does it matter to put two media player applications to Solaris? How will users choose from them? Steve has given an introduction of Songbird. It's also mentioned that Songbird has plan to provide CD playback/ripping feature in the near future. That's great news! But I'm not sure there is interests to add sound recorder funtionality to it. The video part for Songbird works just fine after I built some extra codecses and installed into the system. Well, still need to have some improvement to it to compare with mplayer.
Indiana might be a good vehicle to host Songbird somewhere.
Personally I think Songbird is butt-ugly, and XUL is as slow as treacle, so I'd rather keep it well away from Solaris. Rhythmbox might not win any design awards either, but at least it blends in nicely with the rest of my desktop, and is more a11y-friendly out of the box.
Posted by 212.2.173.193 on April 29, 2008 at 03:49 AM CST #
Thanks for the feedback firstly. Between both media players, some users will obviously tend to prefer one program versus the other.
I'm personally not a Rhythmbox user :/ Some of the Chinese characters(for songs) can't be shown correctly. I don't know how to change the themes(feathers) and also the add-ons/plugin support isn't as good as Songbird. As I know, the A11Y support has been improved a lot for XULRunner 1.9(Hail to all the A11Y developers including the browser team in Beijing!). Any evaluation for the A11Y comparison will be helpful.
Posted by alfred on April 29, 2008 at 12:25 PM CST #
Can I install Songbird in Indiana?
Thanks
Juan Miguel
Posted by Juan Miguel on May 09, 2008 at 05:12 AM CST #
Can I install Songbird in Indiana?
Thanks
Juan Miguel
Posted by Juan Miguel on May 09, 2008 at 05:15 AM CST #
Juan, surely you can. I've tried that on my indiana DP2 box successfully. Please also go to the fluendo to get a free mp3 codecs: https://shop.fluendo.com/product_info.php?products_id=40&osCsid=otbcehf3kqkan6orjig6hecch5. Any problem, just let me know.
Posted by Alfred on May 09, 2008 at 08:37 AM CST #
Alfred,
Great work! I pulled it down and it works for me on snv_81.
I just want to delurk to say that I think it's not really even worth asking the question: "Should this go into Nevada"? The right question is: "How do I get this into the (or at least *some*) repository for OpenSolaris 2008.05?" I think it'll be a lot more worthwhile in the long term to pursue that course.
Keep up the excellent work!
Posted by Dan Price on May 12, 2008 at 01:09 PM CST #