I must have missed a memo, because Hardy was released over four months ago and in that time I never noticed that XMMS was no longer part of the repositories.
Check for yourself. XMMS2 is in there, which I never had a use for. And there are plenty of johnny-come-lately music managers to try out. But XMMS proper has gone the way of the dodo.
I’m not sure I’m completely comfortable with that decision. For those of us who don’t like whiz-bang management suites, or client-server arrangements, or derivatives of the almighty XMMS, that’s a poor direction to head.
Now I’ll admit to preferring Audacious over XMMS, by virtue of the latter’s erstwhile dependence on GTK1.2 for options and menus. On any other day of the week, GTK1.2 is a horrid way to do business.
But yanking it outright is like … like … like. … I don’t know. It’s like throwing out the first computer you ever bought. Or firing the employee who founded the business. Or taking the family dog to the vet to be put to sleep. Yes, it’s ugly and smells bad on humid days. But there are some of us who love it, and others of us who tolerate it when we have to. You just … you just can’t! 😦
And it’s not like it’s dead. Heck, Dillo stagnated for over a year, and it’s still in the repos — and it’s slated for a rebirth. Why toss out XMMS when the last update was in November? Not fair! 😦
Sigh. I guess Ubuntu isn’t the only distro to omit XMMS though. Gentoo, Slackware and Debian unstable don’t. Arch has a package in community, but Crux keeps it in contrib. If others have left it out, I guess I wouldn’t be surprised.
Oh well. My lowly, feeble voice whining into the Internets is obviously not going to change the tide. And I’m not a big enough fan to make a huge deal out of this.
But here is a solution, if you’re like me and you suddenly discover that the music utility helped you move from Windows (and Winamp) to Linux (and XMMS) has been discarded like an old comic book:
Some blessed soul has a 1.2.10 deb posted on Launchpad, and it’s accessible here. Download, unseal with sudo dpkg -i, then bring in whatever dependencies you lack with sudo apt-get install -f.
Problem solved. I suppose I should bellyache that it’s not 1.2.11, which was out in November but somehow doesn’t even show up as the current version for Gutsy. … Oh well. I give up.
But please, before we go running off to make more hasty decisions, let’s at least consider the consequences of our actions in the future. Better yet, before anything is added or removed from future versions of Ubuntu, ask me first.
Yeah, whatever. 🙄
I actually have a reason to keep xmms installed, the xmms demuxer in mplayer only works with xmms, not audacious. And I need it to be able to mplayer spc and gym files :). (That’s snes and sega genesis music file dumps).
Sometimes, when I need a newer version or a customized version of a program, what I do is install all of the dependencies via Pacman and then try to build the program myself. Usually it works for me. You could probably do the same for XMMS.
PCLinuxOS has it in the repos…I don’t see it coming out anytime soon 🙂
I completely agree with you on this one. I still use XMMS, and I don’t even think that it looks bad due to being a GTK 1 app. It’s skinnable! And some of the skins look really, really good, like the Almond set (deep blue is gorgeous).
Yeah, the dialogs may not “shine”, but the app’s purpose is to play music, not to have pretty dialogs. After having it configured, the only time I see the GTK 1 dialogs is when I press “j” (which triggers one of the best and fastest realtime playlist searches in any player).
I considered going the Audacious way, but there was nothing Audacious could bring (me) that made me dump XMMS. And as I also need to use the equalizer and can generally get better results through XMMS’ equalizer than Audacious’… XMMS stuck. You can compare it with the all too well known Winamp presets: just make sure you drop around 10.0 db on the pre-amp in XMMS (otherwise sound output will get distorted) and you’ll know what I mean. And I won’t even get started with resource usage. XMMS can beat many if not most CLI music apps.
Then again, I keep using a few GTK 1 apps, because I just prefer them, like emelfm over emelfm2 – if only the browser would display UTF-8 properly it would be irreplaceable; the old GTK 1 Beaver (editor) over the new GTK 2 version or over other editors, etc.
It’s not like, all of a sudden, XMMS lost its purpose or stopped working. It its mostly unmaintained, but it… just works. And pretty well for most people, if I may add.
Even so, I just don’t care. As long as it’s compilable, I’ll keep on using it.
Man it does the work it should, especially on a machine with low resources.
I found this version “xmms_1.2.11-1_i386.deb” on this site “http://www.ungab.com/content/xmms-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron”. It needs some dependencies to work on my machine (runs CrunchBang Linux ;)) but that’s no problem, I can download them from hardy repos.
Hope it helps someone.
And by the way, nice blog. 🙂
Pozdravi iz Bosne. = Greetings from Bosnia.
I wanted to install it on my K6-2 366 running Debian Lenny. I had previously been using CMus. I was pretty disappointed when it was gone 😦
I just used the Etch package 🙂
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I experienced a similar reaction when I resumed a long-abandoned (due to drive problems) Debian unstable installation recently and found I couldn’t install xmms. I denied, frantically hunting thru apt-cache for what I knew must be there. I raged, at the monstrous, inconceivable fact that what I was looking for, yearning for, was gone. I bargained, trying out every available substitute. Depression set in as I realised no substitute would do.
I no longer want to play music on my pc. This, apparently, is a part of the acceptance phase known as ‘resignation with depressive overtones’.
I can never go back to being my old self again. I have scars, deep scars. But, in time, I may go on to live a normal and happy life.
Damn you, xmms! Damn you to hell! Off you go then, but know this. You’ll be dragging behind you the silent reproach of a million tear-stained eyes, if not more.
Kubler-Ross, you beauty! . . . no no i’m ok, really . . .
i feel . . . somehow lighter . . . at peace . . .
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Hah! I lol’d. 😀
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