How-To: Compile and Install Audacious 2.1 in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

Audacious is a GTK music player similar with the older XMMS (X Multimedia System) player. Ubuntu 9.04 ships with Audacious 1.5.1, which is a little old. However, you can easily install and set up the latest Audacious (currently 2.1) following the steps below:

Audacious 2.1 running in Ubuntu 9.04

1. Install the development libraries
Open GNOME-Terminal or Konsole and type:

sudo apt-get build-dep audacious

This command will fetch and install all the development libraries needed by Audacious, including the build-essential meta package which depends on compilation tools.

You will also need to install the libxml++1.0-dev package:

sudo apt-get install libxml++1.0-dev

2. Download the source tarball
Get the source tarball from the Audacious official website (direct link here), save it for example in your home directory and then uncompress it:

tar -xzf audacious-2.1.tgz

3. Compile and install Audacious
First, you can uninstall the current Audacious from repositories (if you have it installed):

sudo apt-get remove audacious sudo apt-get autoremove

Then, issue the usual commands in the audacious-2.1 directory:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Alternately, you can specify another prefix for the installation, and install Audacious as normal user somewhere inside your home directory. For example:

./configure --prefix=/home/USER/usr
make
make install

Replace USER with your username and make sure the path /home/USER/usr is included in your $PATH environment variable.

At this point, if you run Audacious (using audacious2), the following error may appear: audacious2: unable to launch selected interface skinned

So proceed to the next step and install the plugins.

4. Installing the Audacious plugins
This should be the same as the first part of the tutorial. First, get the development libraries:

sudo apt-get build-dep audacious-plugins

Next, download the source tarball called audacious-plugins-2.1.tgz from the same location (direct link here), uncompress it with tar -xzf audacious-plugins-2.1.tgz, change the current working directory to audacious-plugins-2.1 and issue the usual:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Run audacious as audacious2 (or type Alt+F2 and enter audacious2 in the run box).

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