Installing Firefly Media Server on Ubuntu 6.06

Installing Firefly on Dapper Drake was a breeze:

• Grab mt-daapd_0.9-svn-1463_dapper_i386.deb from here
• dpkg --install mt-daapd_0.9-svn-1463_dapper_i386.deb
• If it complains about dependencies, grab them:
  apt-get install libflac7 libid3tag0 libogg0 libsqlite0 libvorbis0a libvorbisfile3
  That’ll finish the installation of mt-daapd.
• Check to see if it’s working by browsing to http://your-machine:3689
• The main configuration file is /etc/mt-daapd.conf. I didn’t change anything except the mp3_dir, which I set to my iTunes folder on my samba share. I might need to change the scan_type later, as I noticed it was set to “Painfully aggressive”  (As an aside, I manage my music with iTunes on my Mac. I simply moved the entire iTunes folder to the linux box, and created a symbolic link, so that iTunes wouldn’t think anything had changed: cd to ~/Music, and ln -s /Network/Servers/ubuntu/share/iTunes. I have the samba share automounting, and if you check /Network/Servers is a symlink to /automount/Servers. See below.)
• The firefly server should show up in iTunes under the SHARED section.

Upon rebooting my ubuntu box, I found firefly wasn’t running. Checking the forums, helped, and all I needed to do was: ln -s /opt/etc/init.d/S60mt-daapd /etc/rc2.d/S60mt-daapd.

If you need to restart the server, issue (as root) a /etc/init.d/mt-daapd restart. If you check the running processes, you’ll see TWO mt-daapd processes. This had me confused for a while, but is normal.

By default you can’t see your iTunes playlists – this is down to an inappropriately named switch in the config file. Read about it here, under Why can’t I see my iTunes playlists.