Personal Bytes

I wanted to allow my sister to access my DAAP stream. She uses SuSE 9.3 so it involved carrying on the following steps:

• Upgrade to OpenSuSE 10.0 (easier to install some streamline packages);
• Install Rhythmbox 0.9.2 to access the DAAP stream;
• MAD and GStreamer-mad to play decode mp3 files;

The first step went fine. I’ve been updating this machine since SuSE 9.0 without even one single glitch. My sister never had a problem, virus, spyware, crash, what-so-ever. There wasn’t a real need for updating until.. now :-)

Rhythmbox installation was also straightforward. It took more time to find the rpm for 0.9.2 than actually installing it (and its dependencies).

But what really gave me quite an headache was first figuring out why Rhythmbox was not playing MP3 files (but every other music player, like Amarok, was) and how to solve the issue. After discovering that the default gstreamer had the mp3 decoded ripped off due to the same reasons stated before, the issue wasn’t solved yet. I had to install the plugin. Recompiling gstreamer was out of question. Doing such task would take lots of time since it has a lot of dependencies. Fortunately enough I found out that there was a RPM for SuSE 9.3 that works quite fine on OpenSuSE 10.0. Grab it while you can.

Bottomline: Ubuntu rules. It took me one fraction of the time to the exact same thing on Ubuntu. Long live to apt-get.