Into.the.Void.

I use a Mac Mini with OS X 10.5.8 as a media center connected to my TV and I wanted to install Music Player Daemon on it so I could control the music remotely from my laptop or phone. I mostly followed the OS X guide from MPD’s wiki to do it but I ran into some problems while trying to daemonize mpd.

I got the following error while running mpd without –no-daemon:

The process has forked and you cannot use this CoreFoundation functionality safely. You MUST exec().
Break on __THE_PROCESS_HAS_FORKED_AND_YOU_CANNOT_USE_THIS_COREFOUNDATION_FUNCTIONALITY___YOU_MUST_EXEC__() to debug.

When I ran mpd –no-daemon everything was fine though. So in order to “solve” this problem I’ve changed the plist file to include a screen invocation.

My mpd.plist looks like that now:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>mpd</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/opt/local/bin/daemondo</string>
        <string>--label=mpd</string>
        <string>--start-cmd</string>
        <string>screen</string> <!-- path to screen -->
        <string>-dmS</string>
        <string>mpd</string>
        <string>/opt/local/bin/mpd</string> <!-- path to MPD -->
        <string>-v</string>
        <string>--no-daemon</string>
        <string>/Users/kargig/.mpd/mpd.conf</string> <!-- path to MPD config -->
        <string>;</string>
        <string>--stop-cmd</string>
        <string>/opt/local/bin/mpd</string> <!-- path to MPD, again -->
        <string>--kill</string>
        <string>/Users/kargig/.mpd/mpd.conf</string> <!-- path to MPD config, again -->
        <string>;</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
    <key>Disabled</key>
    <false/>
    </dict>
</plist>

So launchctl calls daemondo which calls screen which runs mpd –no-daemon, so mpd doesn’t crash.

I use mpdscribble for scrobbling my music to last.fm. Clients-wise, I use Theremin on OS X, Gnome Music Player Client/gmpc on Debian Linux and MPDroid on Android. And all those connections over IPv6 of course, over my LAN’s Unique Local Addresses to be exact, mpd and all clients listed above work fine with IPv6.

 # lsof -n -i | grep ESTABLISHED | grep 6600
mpd       43025         kargig   12u  IPv6 0x49c719c      0t0    TCP [fdbf:aaaa:aab0:447d:216:XXff:feaa:11XX]:6600->[fdbf:aaaa:aab0:447d:222:XXff:fe1e:d8XX]:48703 (ESTABLISHED)
mpd       43025         kargig   15u  IPv6 0x3127cd4      0t0    TCP [fdbf:aaaa:aab0:447d:216:XXff:feaa:11XX]:6600->[fdbf:aaaa:aab0:447d:fadb:XXff:fe4f:aXX]:51113 (ESTABLISHED)

Apart from MPD’s wiki there’s another nice blog post you can read to help you install mpd on OS X, Integrating MPD with OS X.
For general reference on setting up mpd, Archilinux has a fine wiki entry.

Filed by kargig at 22:52 under IPv6,Linux,MacOSX
Tags: debian, gmpc, ipv6, last.fm, Linux, Mac, mac mini, mpd, MPDroid, mpdscribble, Music Player Daemon, OS X, scrobble, Theremin, ULA, Unique Local Address
1 Comment | 24,075 views

One of the things that good Linux applications should have is uniformity. Just like Mac OS X does. All applications should use the same keybindings to perform the same tasks. For example, on _every_ OS X application, in order to quit it you have to press “CMD+Q”, it’s that simple and everybody follows it. Everybody. On Linux though there are some applications that simply don’t care about uniformity. One of these applications is smplayer.

While it is almost standard for Linux applications to quit using Ctrl+Q, smplayer simply doesn’t have this option. It has the option of closing the current video with Ctrl+X but it doesn’t have the simple option of quitting using a keyboard shortcut.

So, the next (oneliner actually) patch does simply what I described above. It makes smplayer quit using “Ctrl+Q”.

The screenshot that shows what the patch does:

smplayer-0.6.8-quit.patch:
--- smplayer-0.6.8/src/baseguiplus.cpp 2009-08-13 16:07:04.000000000 +0300
+++ smplayer-0.6.8/src/baseguiplus.cpp 2009-08-13 16:08:22.000000000 +0300
@@ -67,8 +67,7 @@
tray->setToolTip( "SMPlayer" );
connect( tray, SIGNAL(activated(QSystemTrayIcon::ActivationReason)),
this, SLOT(trayIconActivated(QSystemTrayIcon::ActivationReason)));
-
- quitAct = new MyAction(this, "quit");
+ quitAct = new MyAction(QKeySequence("Ctrl+Q"), this, "quit");
connect( quitAct, SIGNAL(triggered()), this, SLOT(quit()) );
openMenu->addAction(quitAct);

And a patched ebuild for smplayer-0.6.8 to use this minor patch (only one line is added to the ebuild):
smplayer-0.6.8-r1.ebuild

P.S. Keybindings in smplayer can be set through Preferences, and someone could actually put Ctrl+Q as the quit shortcut but I think that this should be the default setting like most other applications have it. Uniformity matters.

Filed by kargig at 16:19 under Gentoo,Linux
Tags: bug, bugfix, ebuild, Gentoo, Linux, Mac, MacOSX, media player, patch, smplayer
5 Comments | 10,745 views