Ubuntu: Install Amarok 1.4 in 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

Many people still like Amarok 1.4, in spite of the improvements in Amarok since 2.0 was released. Lucid has Amarok 2.3 in the repos, and it’s really nice, but there are still fans of Amarok 1.4 who may want to run that in Lucid.

We’ll be using Bogdan Butnaru‘s Jaunty PPA. (Thanks, Bogdan!) Yes, I said the Jaunty PPA. Bogdan didn’t put one up specifically for Karmic, because there was no change to the packages. The Jaunty packages worked just fine in Karmic, and they work just fine in Lucid, too.

The instructions on the PPA’s link suggest you add the repo to your system by adding ppa:bogdanb/ppa to your system’s Software Sources (System>Administration>Software Sources). If you do it that way, you will have to edit the distribution field in Software Sources to read “jaunty” instead of “lucid.” Or you can do it the old school way, as follows.

Open your sources file for editing:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following lines at the end:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/amarok14/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/amarok14/ubuntu jaunty main

…and save the file. Then add the authentication key and update your sources. In terminal:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys AE74AE63 && sudo apt-get update

Amarok 1.4 cannot coexist with Amarok 2.x, so you’ll need to remove that first:

sudo apt-get remove amarok amarok-utils amarok-common

You must specifically remove amarok-utils. This is important, people. If you don’t, your Amarok 1.4 installation will fail with a dependency error because of a conflict with the collection scanner tool, and apt will subsequently refuse to do anything until you resolve it, which can be tricky. So be sure you get rid of it in this step.

Typically this leaves some packages behind that you don’t really need any more, so let’s be neat and clean them up:

sudo apt-get autoremove

Before installing Amarok 1.4, there is a dependency that must be manually satisfied. Sometime between the Lucid beta and the release candidate, the libmysqlclient15off package was dropped from the Ubuntu repositories, and your installation will need that. Get the Karmic version from http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/libmysqlclient15off and install it. There’s a pair of download links at the bottom of that page; choose the one appropriate for your system (32-bit or 64-bit), click to download the .deb file, and then double-click the .deb file to install it.

Now you can install 1.4:

sudo apt-get install amarok14

And you’re finished. If you had the path to your media collection already defined in Amarok 2.x, 1.4 will do a rescan when you start it for the first time. If you wind up with two Amarok launchers in your Applications>Sound & Video menu, don’t worry about it; the extra one will go away next time you reboot.

One warning: Lucid is set up so that KDE4 applications run under Gnome follow Gnome’s appearance settings for fonts and such. However, Amarok 1.4 is a KDE3 app, and it does not do that; it keeps its own font settings regardless of what you have configured in the Gnome Appearance tool. Changing the Amarok 1.4 fonts would require the KDE system settings tool, and so far I have not found a clean way to install that under Gnome without dependency problems. I’ll revisit that eventually. If you want an Amarok-like music player designed for KDE4, try Clementine; it’s a port of Amarok 1.4 to the KDE4 environment. It’s promising, but it’s still in development and is still missing some Amarok features like Smart Playlists.

Reference: http://www.dwasifar.com/?p=1111