This is very much in flux so things here may change at my whim. Keep up on the linux-karma-devel mailing list (http://linux-karma.sf.net).

Prerequisites

• linux 2.6.16 (2.6.19+ recommended)

• omfs-0.7.3

• libkarma-0.0.5 (latest from mercurial recommended)

• a mono runtime and development environment. Be prepared to apt-get install a lot of things to get banshee to compile.

Hal

Hal needs new scripts in order to tag the Karma as an audio player and to provide the 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    user,noauto    0   0

karma-sharp

These are mono bindings for libkarma, which are part of libkarma proper. If you have mono installed at build time for libkarma, karma-sharp should get built and installed automatically.

Banshee patch

Since Banshee version 0.11.3, Karma support is built-in. However, you will have problems synchronizing without the following patch:

• Keep Banshee from transcoding Karma on upload

Download the patch, then:

$ patch -p1 < fix-transcode.patch
$ automake
$ autoconf
$ ./configure
$ make && sudo make install

If you have karma-sharp installed it should select the Karma DAP plugin automatically. If you do not see "Karma: yes" at the end of configure, it will _not_ work.

Icon

To display the Karma symbol, put an icon under /usr/share/icons/… such as this one.

Screenshots