kdf wrote:
that's a font crash. are you trying to run slimserver 5.4 with a softsqueeze session that is still running from 6.0?
SB2 (and softsqueeze 2.0a11) use different fonts, so they will cause earlier servers to barf.
It may also be that you ran with 6.0 and it had the same MAC addy, so the player prefs have been updated with SB2 stuff. You may have some better luck if you play with the softsqueeze settings to have different mac addresses.
I just figured that out for myself a few seconds ago. When I killed the copy of softsqueeze I had been running, slimserver 5.4 came back up.
You know, I hate to say this but it's really been bothering me for some time and I think I need to say it. The Squeezebox is a *really* nice piece of hardware. When it works, it's wonderful. The design philosophy of having the box do just the essential functions and do them well while moving all the smarts to a much more capable and open server is exactly the right approach.
But this also means that without its server, the Squeezebox is a totally useless lump of plastic. So that server has *got* to be reliable.
Since I got my first Squeezebox, I've been more than a little surprised at the overall brittleness of the server software, at least on Linux (I haven't tried any of the other OS versions). It seems to abruptly exit at the slightest provocation, such as this little mixup on fonts. Various cryptic Perl error messages appear from time to time in the log; whether they're cause for concern, I haven't a clue. Seemingly simple web operations, like walking down a directory tree, often take undue amounts of time. Sometimes I'll see it gobbling all available CPU time for no apparent reason; aborting and restarting seems to make it behave again for a while. Clicking "rescan" after adding music rarely seems to work right; I almost always have to blow away the cache and restart. And so on.
That's with the 5.4 version. The 6.0 versions have been even worse; I haven't gotten one to play yet without crashing within the first minute or two with another flurry of cryptic Perl error messages.
This is not quite what I expected from a consumer product seeking a mass market. It is just not reasonable to expect every user of a device like this to be a skilled Perl hacker, able to know that a cryptic message like
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /usr/local/slimserver_5.4/Slim/Player/SqueezeboxG.pm line 123.
followed by an abrupt server crash means that you're running an incompatible version of the client somewhere on your network. Not only should the error message be a little more informative, but the user just might be forgiven for foolishly expecting that software written as a multi-user network server should be just a little more robust against unexpected input in general.
I don't know why it should be so difficult to make a simple and robust server for this thing. Perhaps the other users consider a rich selection of 17 web "skins" and the various plugins and news ticker crawls more important than basic functionality and robustness; I don't know. But I do know that, as nice as the Squeezebox is, I just can't recommend it yet to my less technical friends until it comes with a *far* more robust and foolproof server. When it does, I'll recommend it wholeheartedly.
--Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
