Thoughts from the abyss

My project this weekend was to start ripping my entire CD collection to my desktop computer. I have 2 - 200Gb Maxtor drives just sitting here looking bored in a Raid 1 configuration, so I decided to put them to use. What a hell of a lot of work, though. If you care to read on, my friend showed me Amarok.

I was running CentOS 4.5. My friend did his installation on FC6 since there are RPMs already in existence, but I had to do things the hard way. I didn’t want to have to completely re-do my desktop, I get tired of installations, and I have a metric load of custom configurations and packages installed. I backed all my stuff up onto an external hard drive, and then did an upgrade through the CentOS 5 CDs, even though that’s not usually recommended. That part actually went very smooth. There were only a few packages which didn’t catch the upgrade, and therefor still remained el4.rpm packages. Even all of my third-party repo packages from Dag that I have installed upgraded fine with yum. Sweet, I said.

Next, I was on a mission to attempt to install the FC6 RPMs on EL5…yeah that didn’t work due to dependencie issues, which I assumed would be the case. Sometimes you get away with that since FC6 is what rolls into EL5. Anyways, I headed to their download section to get the latest source code and figured I’d just compile it and install it that way. I unpacked the source and started the configure process. After configure failed with a ton of development KDE libraries, and a ton of other sound development items, I had to install a lot of RPM packages. Thankfully, though, between the CentOS 5 stock packages and Dag’s packages, I got things up and running. It’s freaking sweet!

All you have to do is point Amarok to your MP3 or OGG collection and it completely becomes indexed and searchable. It downloads the cover pictures and everything. Go check it out if you’re looking to put all your music on a PC.