A Word About Banshee

The music player Banshee boasted a host of features that seemed to bring multimedia functionality in Linux up to what the rest of the world merely expected: a winamp clone.

OK: so here goes:

Banshee will not run from the Applications menu until it is run from the command line at least once. Even in Banshee's documentation, this gotcha is not made clear.

Even so, just dropping to console and using "start banshee" "banshee start" or just "banshee" is not good enough.

The way to run banshee from console is to login as root and use the command "banshee-1". It took an hour of combing forums to find this out.

It took Banshee three crashes and 15 minutes to start the first time. The only way to know Banshee had crashed was if you happened to have to console still up so you could see the error messages. Otherwise, you would just sit there and wait, as you have become accustomed to doing.

After getting it to run once, you quit and try the launcher. Banshee stalls, then explodes, like a grenade with a five second fuse. X goes down like a prom queen, ctrl-alt-esc results in scrambled video, and a reboot reveals that your entire partition is trashed -- Fedora reports there is no ext3 partition and dies.

I know I should just report this and ask nicely for help. But what good will that do if clear instructions never existed to begin with? How will I ever know if it was a problem with me, or the program, or both? And that took hours to sort out. Why would I want to subject myself to that? And what good are forums if it takes hours to find the somplest of answers?

I'm ranting now, but this is terrible. Do Not Want!