Amarok + Ubuntu Feisty Fawn = itunes replacement for linux?

Submitted by Chad on Wed, 05/16/2007 - 9:36pm.

• how-to
• linux
• Tech

So, I've just made the switch over to Ubuntu full time at home. I'm having fun figuring out what works with what. One of my priorities, of course, is to get my ipod nano to sync with Ubuntu. However one of my personal caveats with this is to get podcasts to stay in the podcast folder on the ipod, and work like they always have. My first run was with Banshee. I've always been a fan of the Mono project so I try to follow there software as much as I can. I had heard about banshee and figured I'd give it a go. Great. I loaded laptop battery her up, and it has a really nice interface. Easy to use toolbars, and all around looks and feels great. It synced with my music collection, and I was rolling. Cool. Then I decided to go for the pass drug test real test. I grabbed ye ole ipod and plugged it in to my front usb. I got this. So I proceeded to do the right thing and do some research, and finally after loading and older version of firmware on the ipod, I got it to sync. However, the podcasts were now set up differently. I didn't like it, and decided to seeT if there were other viable solutions. Back in my KDE days (I switched to it for about 3 months a year ago to try it out), I remembered a great program called Amarok. A quick search on Google told me I was on the right track, so I went to my synaptic package manager and found it. There are only two catches that I found with Amarok. The first is that you have to load a lot of backend KDE stuff for it to work in gnome. This is transparent to the user, but if you are low on hard drive space, you might want to make a note of it. A quick note I forgot to mention, even with Banshee, i had to load the package ipod up from synaptic as well. A quick

apt-get install ipod

will do the trick from command line. Also, if you want to know the apt-get for Amarok, you guessed it. It is

apt-get install amarok

Once in stalled, I went ahead and fired it up.T Amarok went into a one time setup asking me severalT intuitive questions, I gave it the path to my music files and then I came to the part where it asks me what type of database I want to use. Hmm, I didn't see this one coming. It states that the default is not quite as fast as the MySQL server, so I decided to go ahead and load up a MySQL server and load the database into that. Not only is it cool, but I love MySQL. For those following along, and wanting to use MySQL, it takes a little setting up. If you just want to use the default database, which is fine, jump ahead. To set up a MySQL database, you will need to hop onto terminal or Synaptic and grab mysql-server. Then you set it up using the commands below. I will first set up the root user for MySQL and then I will create a database called amarok, and a user called amarok, so that we can have a less privileged user to connect only to the amarok database. To do this, use the following commands.