Over at the Atheist Experience blog they do a wonderful comparison of the Batman Begins movie with the Sodom and Gomorrah story. It’s a bit long but the argument that Batman Begins is a retelling of the story with a humanist twist is fairly complelling.
So I’m in the process of moving through the upgrade chain (new gaming rig, move desk top to old gaming rig, move server to old desktop, etc) and so was installing Ubuntu 8.04 onto my desktop and all is going well. At some point I plugged my Sansa Express in to recharge and move some files and Rhythmbox opened. I don’t use Rhythmbox to do music, I use Amarok.
Amarok has crossfading and musicbrainz integration and decent song management which is just about all I need out of a music player. Â So once I get Amarok installed (sudo apt-get install amarok), Rhythmbox still pops up when I plug in my Sansa.
This should be a simple to fix. From the file browser choosing Edit -> Preferences and click on the Media tab.  Go to the Media Player drop down the select Amarok….
You probably noticed that Amarok isn’t actually there. Epic failure. With extensive Google-fu and reading a 5 page discussion on the closed Hardy Heron beta forums I found an answer. I can’t imagine it is the answer imagined by the Ubuntu/Gnome/Nautilus people, but it has the advantage of working.
The file associations in Hardy Heron are stored in /etc/gnome/defaults.list. I don’t know if there should be a personal override version of this list (it is possible that the personal version of this file lives at ~/.local/application/defaults.list). If you edit this file as root, or your personal override file and change the line:
x-content/audio-player= rhythmbox. desktop
to read
x-content/audio-player=kde/ amarok. desktop
It should work. If it doesn’t change the line to
x-content/audio-player= amarok. desktop
and create a symbolic link
sudo ln -s /usr/share/applications/kde/amarok.desktop /usr/share/applications/amarok.desktop
Now, if you go back to where we began– from the file browser choose Edit -> Preferences and click on the Media tab. Â Go to the Media Player drop down the select Amarok…. and everything should work fine.