Layman Linux

Last.fm provides a good platform to share with the world your music liking & also to befriend people who share similar music taste like yours. Most Last.fm users scrobb(post) their tracks on their profile via the media player. The media player updates the tracks played by the user onto their profile in real-time. This is done by a plugin which pings the Last.fm server. On Linux if you’re using XMMS media player, you can update your track list by using the XMMS-Scrobbler plugin. I’ll tell you how to install XMMS media player, the XMMS scrobbler plugin & then configure the plugin so it can update your profile on Last.fm.

I assume that you don’t have XMMS media player installed on your system. Before you install it, you’ll need to enable the RPMFusion repositories. Simply follow the instructions on this page to enable them as per your operating system.

To install XMMS media player on a Fedora or its derivative system, issue the following command with root privileges into the terminal.

yum install xmms xmms-scrobbler

The above command will install XMMS media player and the XMMS Scrobbler Plugin.

Once you’re done with the above, launch XMMS & then right click & go to Option > Preferences. Here click on the ‘General Plugins’ tab. You should see ‘XMMS-Scrobbler’ plugin. Highlight the plugin by clicking on it and then click on configure. It will prompt you for your Last.fm username & password. Enter them & click ok. Now in the General Plugin tab with XMMS-Scrobble plugin highlighted check the Enable plugin chechbox.

That’s it. The XMMS-Scrobbler plugin is enabled. Now play a track in XMMS media player & check whether it gets scrobbed on your Last.fm profile. If it does then all is good. If it doesn’t then you will have to recheck whether you entered the correct credentials in the plugin configuration page.

Happy Scrobbing!

Everytime one installs a new operating system there are some tasks needed to be performed before one can start using the system. There are many task which one should do after a fresh install like disabling unwanted services, customizing settings etc but here we would talk about the most important task – Installing essentials. Essentials are those software which are required to make a crude system usable. These includes flash player, add-on plugins, media players, codecs & small utility software’s.

Generally, most of the users would hit various sites to download & install the essentials. Some users tend to do the same but via graphical package managers. Though there is nothing wrong in the above methods but these methods tend to consume a lot of time. Even I used to follow the same until I got to know about Easy Life.

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