How-To: Compile and Install XMMS in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

XMMS (X Multimedia System) was a very popular audio player for many years, but it was dumped from Debian Lenny and Ubuntu since it uses older GTK+ libraries and it is not maintained any more. It was replaced with the newer Audacious player on both distributions, which you can install by typing sudo apt-get install audacious in a terminal.


However, if you want to compile it from source in Ubuntu 9.04 and 8.10, you can follow the steps below:

1. Install the tools needed for compilation and XMMS dependencies
Open up a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

build-essential is a meta package which depends on tools needed for compilation, like gcc (GNU Compiler Collection). Next, install the development libraries:

sudo apt-get install libgtk1.2-dev libglib1.2-dev

It's recommended to also install libvorbis-dev, for the Ogg Vorbis plugin:

sudo apt-get install libvorbis-dev

2. Download the XMMS source
Get the source from the official website, here, and save it to a location of your choice. Next, make sure the current working directory is the one where you saved the source, then uncompress it using one of the following commands (depending on which file you downloaded, the .tar.gz or the .tar.bz2):

tar -xzf xmms-1.2.11.tar.gz

Or:

tar -xjf xmms-1.2.11.tar.bz2

3. Compile and install XMMS
Change the working directory to xmms-1.2.11 and issue the following commands to configure, compile and install it:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Next, run ldconfig as root:

sudo ldconfig

This should be all. Run XMMS by typing ALT+F2 and entering xmms in the Run dialogue that appears. Notice that XMMS will not be able to play sound if there is another audio or video player running.

To uninstall it, issue the command sudo make uninstall in the same directory from which you installed it.

An alternate way of installing XMMS in Intrepid Ibex, without compiling it, is to follow this short guide. Basically, you will have to add the following two lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmms/intrepid ./
deb-src http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmms/intrepid ./

Update the package lists and install XMMS using:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xmms