I finally found out why Banshee 2.4 could not detect any media players. It needs gvfs and gnome-disk-utility for that, but this isn’t mentioned anywhere on the website.

So I added these dependencies which created a lot more dependencies (and depending dependencies ) and fixed some other bugs also.

The new Banshee is available here:

http://schmatzler.de/banshee-may-2012/

Here are the new packages in detail:

avahi – is needed to build gnome-disk-utility
gnome-disk-utility and gvfs – are needed to show more information on mounted devices, otherwise Banshee can’t find them. (see this bug)
gnome-keyring and libgnome-keyring – these shouldn’t be needed, but without them, gvfs shows lesser information on devices.
gst-ffmpeg, gst-plugins-bad, gst-plugins-ugly – these are needed to play more file formats, e.g. I couldn’t play WMA without them. I installed AlienBobs ffmpeg package together with gst-ffmpeg
libdaemon, libtasn1, libunique – dependencies for GDU
banshee-community-extensions – A set of plugins for banshee

Hope you enjoy! Finally with mass storage support. I know, Banshee is one of the biggest players and not easy to maintain. But I hate Clementine.

Note: If the Youtube plugin doesn’t work, import Youtubes certificate first:
mozroots --import --sync

Update 7th May, 20:43 GMT – Added lame and rebuilt gst-plugins-ugly with lame-support. Banshee is now able to rip CD’s and streams in MP3 format.

If you have missing icons, add the line
gtk-fallback-icon-theme = "Tango"
to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0

15th May:

Another update today. Thanks to the folks over at Archlinux I was able to build Banshee against libgpod-sharp. So there is Ipod and Iphone support now in my Banshee packages!

The following packages where added:
usbmuxd
libimobiledevice
libgpod-sharp
banshee has been rebuilt.

Recently I discovered a new plugin for Pidgin: pidgin-opensteamworks. With this plugin you are able to connect to your friends on Valves Steam network.

The developers do not provide an x86_64 library. Here are the instructions for building one:

First, you need libjson-glib, otherwise it will not compile.

After that, check out the source code of the plugin:

svn checkout http://pidgin-opensteamworks.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pidgin-opensteamworks-read-only

Change to the new directory and download the unoffical Makefile for this plugin:

cd pidgin-opensteamworks-read-only/steam-mobile

wget http://schmatzler.de/wp-content/Makefile

Build the plugin and install it:

make && cp libsteam.so /usr/lib64/purple-2/libsteam.so

Last but not least, install the icons:

wget http://pidgin-opensteamworks.googlecode.com/files/icons.zip

unzip icons.zip /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocols

Done! Now you can add a new account in Pidgin (named “Steam”) and login with your Steam username and password!

If you don’t want to compile it, you can try out my libsteam.so: http://schmatzler.de/wp-content/libsteam.so