Installing Songbird

If you want to use Songbird as a media player in Debian, you may run into some problems since there isn't a Songbird .deb installation file compatible with Debian. You're in luck, though, because it's not too difficult to install from the tarball available from the Songbird website. We'll start in the logical place by downloading the tarball here, or you can use wget:

$ wget http://download.songbirdnest.com/installer/linux/i686/Songbird_1.1.2-1042_linux-i686.tar.gz

Now we want to untar the installation file:

# tar -xvf Songbird_1.1.2-1042_linux-i686.tar.gz -C /usr/share/

The above will create a directory Songbird inside /usr/share/. This way we can keep things clear in your home directory. In theory, we could actually run Songbird right now; however, we can do a few easy things to make it much easier to use Songbird. First thing, we're going to create a shell script, /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh, containing the following text:

#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/share/Songbird
./songbird

We can create this file with our favourite text editor or straight from the command line with cat:

# vim /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh

Or:

# gedit /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh

Or:

# cat > /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh << EOF
#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/share/Songbird
./songbird
EOF

The next thing we need to do is to change the permissions on the /usr/share/Songbird directory and all child objects so that users other than root can run Songbird:

# chmod 755 -R /usr/share/Songbird

Now the next thing we want is to be able to launch Songbird simply by typing songbird into the terminal, the run prompt, or deskbar. We can do that simply by creating a symbolic link to the shell script we just created:

# ln -s /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh /usr/bin/songbird

Now you can go ahead and test this out simply by typing songbird into the terminal, run prompt, or deskbar. The next thing that many people will probably ask for is to add Songbird to their menu. We just need to run alacarte to do this:

$ alacarte

Alacarte should also be accessible from the System menu (System -> Preferences -> Main Menu). You'll want to select the menu item you would like Songbird to appear under in the Menus panel to the left, and then click the New Item button on the right. In the Create Launcher window, you'll want to use the following settings:

• Type - Application
• Name - Songbird
• Command - songbird
• Comment - Whatever description you would like, or leave it blank

Click OK to create the launcher and then make sure the Show checkbox is checked for Songbird in the Items panel in the middle. Then click close and you will now be able to launch Songbird from your menu.

Enjoy listening to your music in Songbird. See you next time.