Kubuntu: Unable to activate Media Player Keys

I’ve recently given Kubuntu 8.04 a whirl, after 2 years with Fedora and Sabayon Linux exclusively. And Kubuntu’s quite nice!

But, whenever switching to a new distro, there’s always an irritating issue or two. For Kubuntu, the most vexing was trying to play any kind of a file with the Totem media player. I tried every media file I had: mp3, ogg, avi, wmv, mp4, and even the lowly wav. It didn’t matter what I attempted to play, I’d the the following error message:

Helpful, yes? No. Not so much.

I first tried installing every codec I could find, but with no success. Only after 20 minutes of searching did I find the issue: dbus-x11. Install that puppy, and you’re set. I have no idea why it’s not included automatically, as it seems to be pretty important, but it isn’t.

So, if you’re getting the Unable to activate Media Player Keys error message, fire up Synaptic and install dbus-x11. I assume this will work for Ubuntu, too, but I don’t have it installed anywhere to test.

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