Installing Songbird 1.7.3 on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid

Download the "Songbird 1.7.3 Generic Linux Tarball" for your architecture from the Linux section of the Contributed Builds page on the Songbird wiki. Extract this to a good permanent location (this is the install directory, which contains all the files required to run Songbird), I chose /home/jack/programs/songbird.

I read over the instructions on the Building Songbird page. This was just to make sure I had the right dependencies installed (the rest of the instructions are for compiling from source, which we don't need to do). It also showed me how to completely uninstall any previous versions.

Now I tried running songbird for the first time (running the songbird script in your songbird directory), and it worked, but was giving loads of GStreamer warnings e.g.

Failed to load plugin /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdvdspu.so undefined symbol: gst_video_event_parse_still_frame

This is caused by a clash between Songbird's included libraries and those installed on your computer. The solution is to tell Songbird to only use it's own libraries. This is done by exporting an environment variable before running Songbird each time, for which I have created a little script called songbird-gst-fix, and put in my home/USER/bin directory:

#!/bin/sh
export SB_GST_NO_SYSTEM=1
/home/jack/programs/songbird/songbird

You can now run songbird with the command songbird-gst-fix. I still get a few GDK icon warnings e.g.

gdk_window_set_icon_list: icons too large

But these don't seem to do any harm. Also if you occasionally get an error like this:

Could not call boundObserver.observe(). Key = metadata.artist

It is caused by the "New Releases" add-on, but it doesn't seem to cause any problems. The only way I cant find to get rid of it is to disable the add-on.


REFERENCES: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1086378