Why doesn the Preferences dialog have sensible defaults? All the fields are blank at first.
This usually happens when you are installing Music Applet as an ordinary user as opposed to root. Although all the files will be installed in whatever directory you specified as the –prefix at configure time, GConf will still try to install the applet’s schema file (which has those sensible defaults you’re looking for) in a directory only writable by root. If you look at the output from a “make install”, you’ll probably see GConf’s verbose error messages about this. The workaround is to specify at configure time where to install the schema. Use the configure script’s –with-gconf-source option to tell GConf to install the schema in your user’s GConf store, instead of the system-wide one. For example, this works for me: –with-gconf-source=xml:merged:$HOME/.gconf Of course, GConf has a few different ways to store its data (that’s what the xml:merged part is all about), so check what your copy of GConf is using first.
