Digikam tries to initialize phonon when run from Gnome

[Reuben Firmin]

Binary package hint: digikam

I use Gnome, but I find digikam to be the best photo management software. When I start digikam, I get a notification popup saying that Phonon could not be initialized properly. Digikam does not (as far as I know) perform any sound tasks; even if it does, it should not rely on the KDE sound layer. Shouldn't there be a generalized (freedesktop.org) API to the sound layer that both Gnome and KDE can use?

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Jan 5 11:55:41 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: digikam 2:1.0.0~rc-1ubuntu1~karmic1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-16.53-generic
SourcePackage: digikam
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-16-generic i686

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

The KDE notification system (knotify) uses Phonon for audio notifications.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Hmm, last sentence got cut off.
Most applications using KDE make use of knotify, and Digikam is not doing anything special in using it.

[Reuben Firmin (reubenf)]

I can believe that. However, it's jarring - and it's a point of failure of integration between Gnome and QT apps. Plenty of QT apps are best of breed, and this arguably sub-optimal design should not restrict the freedom of Gnome users to use them.

Can you please mark this wishlist rather than invalid?

[Luka Renko (lure)]

I think your problem may be related to use of PulseAudio in GNOME/Ubuntu, while KDE 4.3 used in 9.10 is not supporting PA yet. KDE 4.4 should have proper PulseAudio support and may fix your issue.

If you would like to try out KDE 4.4 beta2 (there will be also RC in around a week), you could try it from kubuntu-ppa/beta PPA. Note: this will upgrade all KDE related packages to KDE 4.4 prerelease version.

In any case, it is not much that Ubuntu packagers can do to solve this issue, so it might be better to report the problem to upstream, i.e. http://bugs.kde.org