Ubuntu 11.04 Banshee Issue Overcome

Upon installation of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), I experienced difficulty with the default media player, Banshee. What I experienced was the Banshee UI not rendering text correctly. For me this made Banshee completely useless.

Running Banshee from the command line prompt clued be into the fact that the file, /etc/pango/pango.modules, had not been created. Additionally, this provided insight as to how the file should be properly created. What I found when I attempted to issue the pango-querymodules command (noted below in Step 3) was that permission was denied, even when the command was prefaced with 'sudo'. Subsequently, this is what lead to the enabling of the 'root' account.

The level of detail I provide below assumes a minimum familiarity with GNU/Linux systems and the associated vernacular. Without an further ado, in an effort to overcome the aforementioned issue I performed the following:

1. Enable root account under Ubuntu by opening a terminal (CTRL-ALT-T) and using the commands:

sudo passwd root
sudo passwd -u root

2. Bring up a text terminal (CTRL-ALT-F1) and login as 'root' using the newly established password.

3. Once logged in as root, issue the command:

pango-querymodules > '/etc/pango/pango.modules'

4. Logout of 'root' account in text terminal (type 'exit', without quotes).

5. Return to GUI (CTRL-ALT-F7), and fire up Banshee. If everything went according to plan, you should have a usable media player. That's all, folks.

Assign Application for Specific Mime Type

For my multimedia, whether it is audio and/or video, I prefer to use VLC. However, when browsing files using Nautilus under GNOME, I found that the default application associated with a specific multimedia type was not the VLC I desired. This is not a major issue as I can right mouse click on the iconic representation of the file I want to initiate, and then select VLC from the menu (see Figure 1):


Figure 1

In this case I have already made the necessary modification such that when I double-click on the multimedia file in question, VLC is automatically initiated. Suppose however that this was not the case. The next step would be to select the "Properties" menu item. Again, refer to Figure 1.

The result is a dialog box similar to that which is depicted in Figure 2.


Figure 2

Toward the top of the dialog box, select the "Open With" tab. The result will be similar to that depicted in Figure 3. From here, select the appropriate application you wish to use as the default for opening a file of this type.


Figure 3

It should be noted that if the application you wish to use is not listed, you can select the "Add" button near the bottom of the dialog box and provide the required information. Once you are happy with your application selection, click on the "Close button at the bottom right-hand side of the dialog box and you are finished.

Now when you double click on the icon associated with a file of the specific type for which you just defined the default application, the newly selected application will be launched.

And with that, I am off to see the wizard...