Pervasive Smothering

Good news for music listeners using a Linux distro. There is now a Linux version available of the Last.FM player:

Here is a brief tutorial on how to install it on Ubuntu Linux.

You’re going to have to compile from the files in the tarball. And for compiling, you’ll need to get Qt4. In case you can’t find Qt4 in Apt or Synaptic, make sure your sources.list file (located in /etc/apt/sources.list) has plenty of repositories (for that, you can check this Sources.list generator).

You can check if you have a recent version of Qt installed by typing entering the following command in the Terminal:
$ qmake -v
This should output something like:

QMake version: 2.00a
Using Qt version 4.1.2 in /usr/lib

You should read the ‘readme’ file for the installation instructions. However there seems to be a small difference in the steps needed to compile in Ubuntu.

The instructions tell you to run the following commands:
$ qmake
$ make

However when I ran these commands, I got some instructions on the usage of qmake and also received an error telling me ‘bash: make: command not found‘.

In my case, I typed in
$ qmake -project
$ qmake
And everything worked fine. A ’shell script’ file called ‘lastfm’ was generated and when I ran it, the Last.FM player ran flawlessly:

Additionally, you might want to integrate the handling of lastfm:// links into Firefox.

What I did is rename the ‘lastfm’ shell script into ‘player’. I then renamed the Last.FM folder to ‘lastfm’. I moved the ‘lastfm’ folder to /home/your_username/ and…

If you want to enable Firefox to handle the lastfm protocol, you have to:

1. type in the Firefox address bar ‘about:config’
2. create a new string value by right-clicking anywhere and selecting ‘new string’
3. as the preference name, set ‘network.protocol-handler.app.lastfm’, and as its value ‘/home/your_username/lastfm/player’.