Alphatek – Steven's Tech Blog

The last time I tried the Banshee music player it was around Fedora 8/9 and it was very buggy with a lot of crashes. So until now I was using the default Rhythmbox application provided with Fedora 11/Gnome to listen to music and manage my podcasts. To be honest, Rhythmbox was a bit flawed for my use case as it didn’t allow to synchronize my podcasts to my music player (a Nokia 5310 phone); I was using an rsync script for that. Recently, things went downhill…DAAP music sharing worked when it wanted to work and with the latest update, Rhythmbox has bricked all my podcast feeds. Great.

So it was the perfect opportunity to look for another application…it turns out that Banshee is now a really great and mature product (if you don’t mind installing the Mono stack). It supports smart playlists, automatic cover art download, dynamic music library update, videos using the gstreamer back-end, online radios, podcasts AND an automatic synchronization to my Nokia phone! Wooohooo…the only drawback in comparison to Rhythmbox is that it doesn’t act as a DAAP music server.

For various reasons I like the Apple Mac Minis, they are cheap, compact, silent, energy efficient and quite powerful. So sometimes I use them as mini servers for some tasks, like as an rsync backup server. For that, I usually install Fedora on them…these Macs are supported since Fedora 9 or so.

When you want to install Fedora on one of these machines, you have 2 choices:

• Use Bootcamp to create an OS X/Fedora dual boot system.
• Install Fedora natively as the only OS.

If you use the second option (which is what I do), you will soon be faced with an annoying problem: the Fedora you just installed via the graphical interface probably won’t boot. Your Mac will display a message saying something like “No boot device found, please insert a bootable media”. Duh.

The problem is that Intel Macs are using EFI instead of a standard BIOS, and the hard drive is pre-formatted with a “gpt” partition table instead of the standard “msdos” partition table. To install a working stand-alone Fedora on such a machine, you have to do ONE thing at the right moment:

• When you launch the Anaconda installer from the DVD, hit ctrl+alt+F2 to switch to a console.
• Run “parted” to modify your hard drive structure.
• In parted, run “mklabel msdos” to switch from gpt to the more standard msdos disk label. This will destroy all your data, so be careful.
• Switch back to the installer with ctrl+alt+F6.
• Install Fedora 11 like you do it usually.

That’s it…it can be quite frustrating if you don’t think about it.