Running Exaile on MS Windows
Exaile now runs on Windows, and runs quite well. Thanks to the GStreamer and Songbird people who recently ported GStreamer to Windows.
Functionally this is equivalent to the patched version in ticket #200, only using GStreamer instead of Windows Media Player.
As ticket #200 shows, it really doesn’t take much to make Exaile run
on Windows. Most of it was already cross-platform, largely thanks to the
insistence on using os.sep and os.path.join.
How good
It’s as stable and fast as in Linux, and the majority of features work perfectly. Memory consumption is rather high, but then it’s high even in Linux.
How bad
Encoding errors abound. Don’t expect to be able to import most of your library.
Anything to do with D-Bus has been chopped off and won’t work. In other words, Exaile doesn’t depend on D-Bus anymore; but that’s a hack, not a feature. I’m still hoping for D-Bus and dbus-python on Windows so I can remove the hack.
Things go wrong when Exaile reloads open playlists from the previous session. From the symptoms, I’m guessing that Exaile thinks those tracks are streams.
How it looks
NOTE: Unfortunately, this image has been lost to time.
How
The changes I made are set for Exaile 0.2.11. For now they’re only available in trunk.
The requirements are basically identical to the ones mentioned in Exaile’s Website, except
that you don’t get to apt-get them.
- Python
- GTK+ and libglade for Windows
- PyGTK and its dependencies
- GStreamer, its plugins, and its Python bindings
- Mutagen
- For Python < 2.5, pysqlite
- For Python < 2.5, ElementTree
Right now binary GStreamer Python bindings are only available in the CVS packages, and they’re compiled for Python 2.4 so you’ll need the 2.4 version of everything.
vim tip: Wrapping text
Sometimes it’s useful to wrap text at a specified column. You can use
Vim’s gq command and textwidth
(tw) option to do this. Now, Vim has tons of options for wrapping
lines (it can even autowrap text while you’re typing) and gq
itself can be used in many different ways, but I normally use gq
to wrap a block of comments after I finished writing it. Simply select the
lines you want to format (in Visual mode) and hit gq. The
wrapping column is determined by textwidth, e.g. :set
tw=80 to wrap at column 80.
Restored from VimTips archive
This article was restored from the VimTips archive. There's probably missing images and broken links (and even some flash references), but it was still important to me to bring them back.