Getting KDE to work partially depends on your DISTRO and how sophisticated your DISTRO'S packagement structure and system is. I'v had not problem getting noatun to work. In fact, it works like a charm. It' works so well I prefer it over xmms. But my friends who use RH and Debian, have a herculian task just getting mplayer to work, forget about noatun or Kaboodle. They just gave up on it. When ever they come over, I intentionally fire up those apps just to make their blood boil. And I await.
Friend 1: So how did you get mplayer to work? I'm having problems getting to work. Can really view quicktime movies? Can you really view real player movies?
ME: Ah, I just did an 'emerge mplayer' and my package manager took care of everything, afterwhich, I could view quicktime, real, wma etc movies with no hassle.
Friend2: How about noatun, the damn thing would just not work.
ME: Bah, The same thing. After emerging KDE it worked out of the box. I only needed to configure it here and there and tweak it here and there and it's all good now.
Friend2: So what distro to you use?
ME: Gentoo
Friend 1: Dude, Gentoo sucks!!!!!
Yes, and the dialogue goes on...
Kaboodle as far as I'm concerned is useless, noatun and kscd in my opinion can rewritten into one app. I would have advocated for xmms over noatun, but really once you get noatun to work and install several other plugins, there is little difference between noatun and xmms.
My two cents.
Mystilleef