Myriam Schweingruber

Long awaited, finally here: the brand new Kubuntu 9.10 aka Karmic Koala is out and ready for download. It comes with KDE 4.3.2 and, of course, a brand new Amarok 2.2 Check out the release notes and download the ISO here:
Congratulations and well done, Kubuntu community!

The KDE bugsquad will organize a bugday for Phonon on November 8th. To make sure not to forget that day, I duly entered it into my Google calendar. But I must say that the mail I got today from Dopplr was quite astonishing: it seems I will travel to Buğday, Turkey on that day!

Now, while I enjoy travelling, I think it’s a bit far away just for a bug triaging event, isn’t it?

Regardless this interesting suggestion, I will stay at home and give a hand in bug triaging, this will probably be more efficient Don’t hesitate to join the fun in #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net on November 8th!

PS. I seem to travel again on November 21st, this time to Giv’at’Ada, Israel. Since I planned to be in Bern for the Swiss Karmic Koala Release Party, I guess that’s what is meant

Another edition of Openexpo in Winterthur is over and I owe you a (not so) short report:

Eckhart, Andi and Adriaan held a booth for KDE, Mark and Sven were manning the Amarok one and I tried to be at both the KDE and Kubuntu booth during these two days. This was made quite easy by the organizers as they arranged the three booths around the same pilar we shared with the guys from the Swiss OLPC Team.

While Andi could only attend the first day (thanks again, Andi, for helping us, it was really nice meeting you!), Adriaan was also wearing his FSFE/FTF hat and was busy with attending talks, FSFE and Swiss FOSS meeting and getting in touch with a lot of Swiss activist, especially during the second day. He sometimes found a little time to show KDE running on OpenSolaris and talk about the pilars of KDE and brought some very yummy Dutch cookies. Eckhart held the KDE flag steadily, selling swag, showing 4.3.1 and handing out CDs (we had Kubuntu 9.04 and Fedora KDE Live Media kindly provided by the Fedora guys from the booth right in front of us). He even found some time on brainstorming about how to improve the booth to make it better despite the little space and prevented the table from getting too much cluttered with empty water glasses, paper and such. Great work, Echkart, as usual! I sat somehow between the KDE and Kubuntu booth (actually the booth of the official Swiss Ubuntu LoCo Team), showing KDE 4.3.1 on my laptop to give people some taste of what they could expect for the next release. The Swiss Team was present with Manuel and Roman on Wednesday, Dirk and Dani on Thursday (since Dani helped out a the OOo booth on the first day) and Nick was the nice guy who attended all two days! He really deserves a special Thank You for his patience and expertise It was also a nice occasion to meet Dirk, who is usually helping out the German team and took his Thursday afternoon off to give a hand.

Despite the ongoning economic crisis, the event was nice although very noisy, with good catering and the organizers did a lot to make us comfortable (thanks again to Hannes and the two Matthias from ch/open !). The adjacent business event called Topsoft was focusing on the same themes as usual, ERP and CRM, with big booths, suits and ties everywhere, expensive flyers and buzzwords. They even had Brazilian dancers on the first evening “apéro” But even without the big money, we had a lot of fun on our side and were greeted with a yummy supper at the social event, listening to some lightning talks (where Sven presented the Darker Radio Charts available as a script in Amarok) and making new acquaintances. Add to that the Free Beer which made us all quite happy

The evening of the second day was topped by a gathering of about 20 Free Software activists in a Spanish bodega with very good tapas and some beer and sangria in Zürich. So sad Eckhart had a train to catch and couldn’t join in, but we will repeat that on the next occasion, promised. How about Openexpo in Spring again?

As we have more and more questions for support on how to install Amarok 2.2 from GIT, I thought I might make another synopsis on how to install a local build. Apparently linking to previous posts is not very useful because people tend not to read the links…

Warning: please do not try this if you are not comfortable with compiling from sources, and be aware that compiling from a development branch can break a few things!

Note: as I use Kubuntu, this is heavily biased, but there are a few indications for other distributions, as far as those have been provided by the previous bloggers.

Thanks go to Mark Kretschmann who started that adventure and wrote the first instructions, to Stephan Jau who wrote an excellent How-to for the SVN version for Kubuntu users and to David Faure who corrected some of our settings. And, of course, all the Amarok Team who do a tremendous job every single day

This document explains how to install Amarok 2 from GIT in your home directory - in an easy way

Update:October 12th 2009 I updated a few things since the first edition, in particular the README content in section 5 and adapted it to the upcoming Karmic Koala aka Kubuntu 9.10 (remember, I am biased)

If you already have an Amarok 2.x version installed from your distro, un-install it to prevent setting conflicts and similar. You will need the kdelibs and kdebase-runtime from KDE 4.2 or higher. Please see also the minimal requirements and mandatory dependencies in section 5.

1.Install git, the compiler and KDE 4 development packages:

• In Kubuntu, Debian, and all their derivatives:
  • sudo aptitude install git-core build-essential kde-devel
• In Archlinux:
  • sudo pacman -Sy git base-devel kdelibs kdebase-runtime
• In Gentoo:
  • sudo emerge -av dev-util/git kdelibs plasma-workspace

2. Install ccache to speed up compilation

ccache is a very nice tool that can speed up your compilation. It speeds up re-compilation of C/C++ code by caching previous compiles and detecting when the same compile is being done again. Install the package from your distribution and set the size of the cache to 2 GB with the command

ccache -M 2G

This will take 2Gb of space in your local directory, but the gain of time is really impressive. Enable the use of ccache by adding it to your local .bashrc, described in step 3 below:

3. Define the PATH and local environment

Append the following to $HOME/.bashrc:

• export PATH=$HOME/kde/bin:$PATH
• export PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:$PATH

Reload your edited .bashrc:

• source $HOME/.bashrc

NOTE: if you are not using the bash shell, edit your proper shell config file (~/.zshrc or ~/.tcshrc or whatever it may be).

4. Make KDE aware of Amarok’s plugin location:

echo 'export KDEDIR=$HOME/kde' >> $HOME/.kde/env/myenv.sh

echo 'export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR' >> $HOME/.kde/env/myenv.sh

5. Make sure you have all the necessary dependencies

The README file in the source states the required and optional dependencies, but I might as well write it down here, so there is no other document to be read for the lazy ones. Of course, before diving into compiling from source, check if those dependencies are available in the package repository of your distro

Note: you must also install the devel versions of these packages!

Required

• KDE-Libs 4.2 + KDE-Base-runtime 4.2 (or newer)
  • http://www.kde.org

• TagLib 1.6 (or newer), Metadata tagging library
  • http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html
  • svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdesupport/taglib

  Note: You need to compile taglib 1.6 with -DWITH_ASF=On -DWITH_MP4=On when running cmake, or use ./configure --enable-asf --enable-mp4

• TagLib Extras 1.0.1 (or newer), Support for metadata reading of additional file types
  • http://kollide.net/~jefferai/taglib-extras-1.0.1.tar.gz
  • svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdesupport/taglib-extras

• MySQL 5.0 (or newer) Embedded: libmysqld compiled with fPIC (In-process database support)

  Note: If you have installed MySQL Embedded in non-default location (i.e. $HOME/usr), Amarok may fail to start with error regarding libmysqlclient library. In this case, add the following string to your ~/.bashrc:

  • export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/lib/mysql:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

    where $HOME/usr is the path you will use in the --prefix option when compiling (see step 7. below)

• QtScript Generator, Qt Bindings 0.1.0 (Qt Bindings for QtScript for Amarok’s scripting system)
  • http://code.google.com/p/qtscriptgenerator/
  • git://labs.trolltech.com/qtscriptgenerator

  Note: make sure to follow all steps described when compiling Qtscriptgenerator

Optional

• libgpod 0.7.0 (or newer), iPod support
  • http://www.gtkpod.org/libgpod.html

• libmtp 0.3.x, MTP device support
  • http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/

• Mp3tunes.com integration (including synchronization) requires:
  • OpenSSL http://www.openssl.org
  • libxml2 http://xmlsoft.org
  • libcurl http://curl.haxx.se
  • Glib2 http://www.gtk.org
  • Loudmouth, the Jabber library, http://www.loudmouth-project.org/
  • Qt must be compiled with Glib enabled

• Liblastfm 0.3 (For scrobbling, Internet radio, and artist info)
  • http://cdn.last.fm/src/liblastfm-0.3.0.tar.bz2
  • http://github.com/mxcl/liblastfm/tree/master

• MySQL 5.0 (or newer) Server (external database support)

5.1.Various dependencies that might cause compile errors and have to be installed:

(these are rather specific to Kubuntu, might have other names in other distributions and/or are already installed)

• libstrigiqtdbusclient-dev
• libsearchclient-dev
• libmysqlclient15off
• libmysqlclient16-dev
• libmysqld-dev
• libmysqld-pic

6. Create folders:

• mkdir $HOME/kde
• mkdir $HOME/kde/src
• mkdir $HOME/kde/build
• mkdir $HOME/kde/build/amarok

7. Checking out and Building:

Now you need a source checkout from Gitorious. In the folder ~/kde/src/, type the following command:

git clone git://gitorious.org/amarok/amarok.git

this will drag approx. 55-60Mb of data, depending on the moment you actually make this checkout.

Everything is now ready to build:

• cd $HOME/kde/build/amarok
• cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $HOME/kde/src/amarok
• make install

8. Updating KDE Config:

• kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

Note: this might not be necessary for most of the cases

Now you are ready to run Amarok 2, by typing “amarok” in the shell. We strongly recommend you run amarok with the -d and –nofork option, so you will have debugging enabled and can get a valid backtrace if Amarok crashes.

9. Updating your Amarok build:

Since the development is quite fast with git, you should update your Amarok build regularly, and a daily checkout is not too much. This is made easy with the following command:

• cd $HOME/kde/src/amarok
• git pull

This will update your local git branch. If you have done modifications to your local branch you would like to keep, make sure you update with the --rebase option. See also the git tutorial for KDE in section 10.

You can now simply build again with

• cd $HOME/kde/build/amarok
• make install

Since you have installed ccache, a full build will speed up over time. To have an idea about the build time, just type time make install when building. If you have several CPU cores, you can speed up even more with the -j[n] option, where [n] is the number of CPU cores +1. Of course, the more CPU you use for building, the less you will have available for other tasks

10. More information and useful links

Don’t forget: running a development version also means that it is not stable and can break anytime ! This is especially true after a feature freeze, when the developers merge their personal git branches to the master branch.

Note: To be notified about major changes you definitely should subscribe to our mailing list amarok@kde.org at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok. Of course you will also find help in our #amarok channel on irc.freenode.net, but reading the mailing list is mandatory and spares us a lot of time.

Since you don’t want to repeat all this completely when you upgrade to a newer version of your preferred distribution, you should consider installing your /home directory on a separate partition from the start, it will spare you quite some time and hassle in the future.

• The git tutorial for KDE
• A shortcut for reporting Amarok bugs

Edit: Casper van Donderen just pointed me to the possibility to have the latest Amarok from git on Windows, too: if you build KDE using the emerge system, just type emerge amarok at the kdeenv command prompt. Thanks for the hint, Casper!

It’s this time of the year again where I prepare for attending OpenExpo in Winterthur. This important Free Software even is held on September 23 & 24 in Winterthur, Switzerland.
This year I helped organizing more than one booth: Amarok, KDE and the Ubuntu/Kubuntu booth of the Swiss Team. While Mark and Sven will handle the Amarok booth, showing the upcoming version 2.2 of your preferred music player, I will share my time at both the KDE and the Ubuntu/Kubuntu one, presenting the latest KDE 4.3.1, using Kubuntu 9.04 (unless I find some time to install a preview of the upcoming Karmic Koala before). Not alone, of course, as I will have a lot of helping hands from Andi, Adriaan, Eckhart and Pascal for KDE, and Daniel, Dirk, Erwin and Roman at the Swiss Team booth

!-- s9ymdb:215 --img width='77' height='72' style=border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/gitorious.png alt= /br / a href=http://gitorious.orghttp://gitorious.org/abr / br / Since Amarok switched to Gitorious, those of you running a local SVN build with markey's a href=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/989-Building-Amarok-SVN-in-HOME-An-Update.html title=Local SVN buildinstructions/a will have to do some changes to stay up-to-date::br / br / li First, you need to install git, which is in the package repositories of your distribution./libr / li Erase the installation you have in ~/kde/src/amarok//libr / li In the folder ~/kde/src/, type the following command: br / ul git clone git://gitorious.org/amarok/amarok.git - this will drag approx. 56Mb of data/ul/libr / li Go to your build folder in ~/kde/build/amarok/ and erase its content, as you need to do a full rebuild/libr / li Run again the cmake command: br / ulcmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $HOME/kde/src/amarok/ul/libr / li Then complete with 'make install' and voilà, you have the most recent 2.2-git img src=http://amarok.kde.org/blog/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=:-) style=display: inline; vertical-align: bottom; class=emoticon //libr / br / For updates, you just run 'git pull' in your ~/kde/src/amarok/ folder and proceed as before with 'make install'.br / br / As usual, don't hesitate to come to #amarok on irc.freenode.net for more questions.br /

Since Amarok switched to Gitorious, those of you running a local SVN build with markey’s instructions will have to do some changes to stay up-to-date::

First, you need to install git, which is in the package repositories of your distribution.

Erase the installation you have in ~/kde/src/amarok/

In the folder ~/kde/src/, type the following command:

git clone git://gitorious.org/amarok/amarok.git - > this will drag approx. 56Mb of data

Go to your build folder in ~/kde/build/amarok/ and erase its content, as you need to do a full rebuild

Run again the cmake command:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $HOME/kde/src/amarok

Then complete with ‘make install’ and voilà, you have the most recent 2.2-git

For updates, you just run ‘git pull’ in your ~/kde/src/amarok/ folder and proceed as before with ‘make install’.

As usual, don’t hesitate to come to #amarok on irc.freenode.net for more questions.