Banshee crashes: The database disk image is malformed

Banshee just crashed on me with the following error message:

[Info  20:44:59.949] Running Banshee 1.6.1: [Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (linux-gnu, x86_64) @ 2010-06-18 18:47:49 UTC]
[Info  20:45:01.043] All services are started 0.949921
Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteException: The database disk image is malformed
database disk image is malformed
at Mono.Data.Sqlite.Sqlite3.Reset (Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteStatement stmt) [0x00000]
at Mono.Data.Sqlite.Sqlite3.Step (Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteStatement stmt) [0x00000]
at Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteCommand.ExecuteNonQuery () [0x00000]
at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteCommand:ExecuteNonQuery ()
at Hyena.Data.Sqlite.HyenaSqliteCommand.Execute (Hyena.Data.Sqlite.HyenaSqliteConnection hconnection, Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteConnection connection) [0x00000]
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---

I think this is how it happened. My computer hanged while Banshee was running, and I had to force reboot it.  Hence, the Banshee database file was corrupted. Thanks to boombox1387 from Ubuntu forum, this problem can be fixed as the following:

Install sqlite3:

sudo apt-get install sqlite3

Then run:

cd ~/.config/banshee-1

Dump the database in an SQL text format:

sqlite3 banshee.db ".dump" > dump

Backup the (corrupted) database:

mv banshee.db banshee.db.backup

Create and restore a database from dump file:

cat dump | sqlite3 banshee.db

Banshee started up again. Both files: dump and banshee.db can be removed.

Credit: [ubuntu] Banshee Crashed

Amarok 2.3.0 and PulseAudio Problem

Ever since I upgraded my Ubuntu desktop from 9.04 to 10.4, I have been having problems with Amarok dropping sound randomly. For example, if Amarok is playing the music and another program requires to use sound, Amarok will become silence.

One solution to restore sound in Amarok is to kill pulseaudio and restart Amarok. It works, but very annoying.

Fortunately, installing libxine1-gnome and configure Amarok to use Esound (ESD) instead of PulseAudio fixed the problem.

Thanks to this bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/amarok/+bug/176332

Change default editor in Debian


# update-alternatives --config editor

There are 7 alternatives which provide `editor’.

Selection Alternative
———————————————–
1 /bin/ed
+ 2 /bin/nano
3 /usr/bin/vim.tiny
* 4 /usr/bin/vim.basic
5 /usr/bin/nedit
6 /usr/bin/emacs21
7 /usr/bin/xemacs21

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 6