Sean McLemon

Posts for Tag: unstable

Debian - Building XMMS 1.2.11 on a modern linux system

Like most people I've recently been consuming all my media via paid streaming services like Netflix and iTunes. The other day however I needed to play an MP3 on my laptop running Debian and instinctively wanted to reach for xmms. Sadly nowadays the original xmms isn't available on Debian, only an "xmms2" package which is much newer and was reworked into some client/server model. I don't really want to figure out how to configure this correctly, to the extent that I was willing to build the original xmms from source ...

Trying the naive "./configure && make && sudo make install" method doesn't go very well when running Debian stretch:
sean@seoul ~/d/s/xmms-1.2.11> ./configure
checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

MANY LINES LATER

*** The glib-config script installed by GLIB could not be found
*** If GLIB was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in
*** your path, or set the GLIB_CONFIG environment variable to the
*** full path to glib-config.
configure: error: *** GLIB >= 1.2.2 not installed - please install first ***
As it turns out I wasn't able to find a pre-built version of GLIB 1.x or (a subsequent dependency) GTK 1.x, I found some sources (GLIB 1.2 and GTK+ 1.2) but these were hitting an error when running ./configure which indicated that the CPU wasn't supported. These libraries pre-date the x86-64 era so my processor wasn't recognised. The fix was to simply drop in a newer config.sub. There was one more issue with the G_GNUC_PRETTY_FUNCTION macro but I resolved that too - I put them onto GitHub as glib-1.x and gtk-1.x in case anyone else wants to use this. Installing them is easy:
$ git clone https://github.com/smcl/gtk-1.x
$ cd gtk-1.x
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr && make
$ sudo make install

$ git clone https://github.com/smcl/glib-1.x
$ cd glib-1.x
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr && make
$ sudo make install
Once these are in place we can grab the "latest" old XMMS sources from xmms.org and build those:
$ curl -LO http://www.xmms.org/files/1.2.x/xmms-1.2.11.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf xmms-1.2.11.tar.gz
$ cd xmms-1.2.11
$ ./configure && make
$ sudo make install

Then if all is well then the original (and best!) xmms should be installed into your path, so you can go download some lovely skin of a brushed aluminium late-90s Sony CD player ... though it might be a little bit tiny if you use a HiDPI screen: