Banshee is a full-featured cross-platform music player. Chances are your distribution's Banshee package does not include the plugin since it has a dependency on libkarma. Feel free to ask your distribution to package everything, but here's how to get it up and running from scratch.

Updates

Apply the following patches from bugzilla to Banshee 1.4.1:

Prerequisites

libkarma

Download libkarma or clone libkarma from the mercurial repository and build it:

    $ hg clone http://www.freakysoft.de/repos/libkarma
    $ cd libkarma
    $ make
    $ sudo make install

Check to make sure karma-sharp was installed correctly. If not, make sure you have mcs and try again.

    $ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
    $ pkg-config --libs karma-sharp
    -r:/usr/local/lib/karma-sharp/karma-sharp.dll

Hal

Hal needs new scripts in order to provide information to your desktop manager to automatically mount the device. Grab 20-rio-karma.fdi and put it in /etc/hal/fdi/information/, then get preferences.fdi and put it in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/. Restart hald and your X session.

fstab

For automatic mounting, add the following line to your /etc/fstab. Otherwise gnome-volume-manager will refuse to mount the device, as it doesn't know about the Karma's proprietary filesystem.

/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Rio_Rio_Karma_0000000000000000-part2    /media/karma    omfs    fmask=0133,dmask=022,user,noauto    0   0

If you have done everything correctly to this point, when you plug in the Karma, it will automatically mount the disk and you will get a desktop icon.

Banshee

Grab banshee from the banshee-project website, subversion, or git mirrors:

    $ git clone git://git-mirror.gnome.org/git/banshee
    $ cd banshee/banshee

More information is available from the official banshee website.

Run autogen:

    $ ./autogen.sh
Note

If you installed libkarma in the default prefix, /usr/local, then you will need to be sure to point pkgconfig to that directory when configuring banshee. You can do that by setting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable:

    $ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

You should see the output of autoconf, automake, and configure. If you get any errors while running these, please check to make sure you have all of the dependencies.

VERY important, after configure successfully completes, you should see the following excerpt from the summary page:

     Digital Audio Player (DAP) Support:
      Mass Storage:    yes
      MTP:             yes
      iPod:            yes
      Karma:           yes

If you do not see "Karma: yes" in that list, then something was wrong. Most likely, configure could not find karma-sharp. Check the config.log for possible reasons.

Install the software:

 $ make && sudo make install

If all went well, banshee should be installed along with the karma plugin.

Now when you plug in the Karma, it should show up in Banshee.

Note

The Mass Storage DAP plugin may claim the Rio Karma in addition to, or before the Karma DAP plugin. It is important to disable the Mass Storage plugin to use the Karma properly; that is possible under Edit->Preferences->Extensions in Banshee.