Tag Archives: nodejs

Google Play Music Desktop Player for Linux

Introduction

Google Play Music Desktop Player (GPMDP) is an amazing application. Instead of opening up a browser every time to access your Google Music account (and songs), you can integrate it into your desktop experience instead. One of the best features GPMDP offers is the fact it becomes a standalone application and no longer requires you to have to deal with the memory hogging web browsers (especially Chrome) uses to stream your favorite music!

GPMDP doesn’t stop there though, there are tons of great features it offers that extend the already great functionality Google Music offers! Just to quote directly from their README file:

  • Supports media keys (play, pause, stop, next, previous)
  • last.fm Scrobbling and Now Playing support!
  • Hands free Voice Controls!
  • Desktop notifications on track change
  • A simplistic mini player
  • Customizable Dark theme
  • Smooth scrolling and overlay scrollbars for a nicer user experience.
  • HTML5 Audio Support – No more Adobe Flash Player!
  • Minimize to task bar for background music playing
  • Customizable hotkeys for those who don’t have media keys.
  • Choose your audio output device from within the player.
Google Music Dark Theme
Google Music Dark Theme

I set up this blog because the RPMs distributed from GPMDP’s official website didn’t work for me. So I just ended up repackaging the whole thing and thought I would share my success.

It’s also important to note that this blog assumes you have a subscription to Google Music. If you don’t have one (and don’t intend to get one), then there is no need to read any further. πŸ™‚

Installation

If you are hooked up to my repository, you can upgrade to the latest packages through the following simple command:

  • CentOS (or Red Hat) 7.x:
    # Run as root (or a user with sudoers permission)
    sudo yum -y install --enablrepo=nuxref google-play-music-desktop-player
    
    # Or you can do it manually:
    # I sign everything; so it wouldn't hurt to just grab my key
    rpm --import http://repo.nuxref.com/pub/NUXREF-GPG-KEY
    # Now you can install the player
    rpm -Uhi http://repo.nuxref.com/centos/7/en/x86_64/custom/google-play-music-desktop-player-3.2.1-1.el7.nuxref.x86_64.rpm
    
  • Fedora 22:
    # I sign everything; so it wouldn't hurt to just grab my key
    rpm --import http://repo.nuxref.com/pub/NUXREF-GPG-KEY
    # Now you can install the player
    rpm -Uhi http://repo.nuxref.com/fedora/fc22/en/x86_64/custom/google-play-music-desktop-player-3.2.1-1.fc22.nuxref.x86_64.rpm
    
    
  • Fedora 23:
    # I sign everything; so it wouldn't hurt to just grab my key
    rpm --import http://repo.nuxref.com/pub/NUXREF-GPG-KEY
    # Now you can install the player
    rpm -Uhi http://repo.nuxref.com/fedora/fc23/en/x86_64/custom/google-play-music-desktop-player-3.2.1-1.fc23.nuxref.x86_64.rpm
    
    
  • Fedora 24:
    # I sign everything; so it wouldn't hurt to just grab my key
    rpm --import http://repo.nuxref.com/pub/NUXREF-GPG-KEY
    # Now you can install the player
    rpm -Uhi http://repo.nuxref.com/fedora/fc24/en/x86_64/custom/google-play-music-desktop-player-3.2.1-1.fc24.nuxref.x86_64.rpm
    
    
  • Fedora 25:
    # I sign everything; so it wouldn't hurt to just grab my key
    rpm --import http://repo.nuxref.com/pub/NUXREF-GPG-KEY
    # Now you can install the player
    rpm -Uhi http://repo.nuxref.com/fedora/fc25/en/x86_64/custom/google-play-music-desktop-player-3.2.1-1.fc25.nuxref.x86_64.rpm
    
    

Gnome Media Player Shell Extension

Pair this application with the Gnome Media Player Shell Extension and you’ll allow even get desktop notifications when songs change.

Media Player Gnome Extension
Media Player Gnome Extension

For CentOS / Red Hat 7 users, this extension sometimes does not properly install itself. So to make your life easier, I went ahead and packaged it into it’s own RPM as well. You can install it like so:

# Assuming you're hooked up to my repository, you can
# just easily install it:
sudo yum install --enablerepo=nuxref gnome-shell-extension-mediaplayer

I didn’t forget about the Fedora users either. It’s also in the repository (if you’re hooked up):

# Assuming you're hooked up to my repository, you can
# just easily install it:
sudo dnf install --enablerepo=nuxref gnome-shell-extension-mediaplayer

RPMs

You can also just visit the locations where I posted these RPMs and fetch them manually:

  Google Play Music Desktop Player Gnome Media Player Shell Extension
CentOS/Red Hat 7.x rpm / src rpm / src
Fedora 22 rpm / src rpm / src
Fedora 23 rpm / src rpm / src
Fedora 24 rpm / src rpm / src
Fedora 25 rpm / src rpm / src

Credit

All of the custom packaging in this blog was done by me personally. I took the open source available to me and rebuilt it to make it an easier solution and decided to share it. If you like what you see and wish to copy and paste this HOWTO, please reference back to this blog post at the very least. It’s really all I ask.

Sources

Install NodeJS v0.12 on CentOS 7

Introduction

NodeJS v0.10 presently ships on CentOS/Red Hat 7.x. If you Google around, there are some hacky ways to upgrade NodeJS on your system, but all of them (at least all of the ones I found) don’t manage these upgrades properly through RPMs.

Now the good folks over at nodesource.com attempted to package this all into one RPM but by doing this, they unfortunately violate a number of standards that Red Hat tries to follow. It also causes some conflicts with any existing (NodeJS) packages you may have been using vs simply gracefully upgrading them. This blog merely offers an alternative (more elegant) solution to the same problem nodesource.com already solved.

What is NodeJS?

For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s a scripting language (like Python and PHP) which allows you to write your code in JavaScript. That’s right, the same language web developers would otherwise write client side code to enhance someones web experience. NodeJS however allows developers to write server side code using this technology.

The tool is constantly evolving and becoming more widely used which is exactly why you need to upgrade your copy to take advantage of the new features it has to offer! πŸ™‚

NodeJS Dependency Nightmare

I’ll be honest up front, NodeJS does suffer from a bit of a dependency nightmare. One component you’ll install will require some other components to work, they in turn will also require components (and so on and so forth). This is no different then other languages, however with NodeJS the problem is that some dependencies don’t connect up with others all the time and some dependencies conflict with another. This prevents you from being able to fully experiment with some of the on-going development and newer features easily. More importantly NodeJS struggles from the lack of Semantic Versioning which is the root cause of the dependency hell we have to work with.

The dependency issues that confront NodeJS are probably the biggest reason it’s not so easily integrated into Linux environments like the other scripting languages are.

The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) team did do a good job of working out a ton of dependencies for us in the past. But no one seems to be keeping up with this. The packages they provided are old… I mean really old. Even the bleeding edge Linux distributions (Fedora 23 and Ubuntu 15.10 at the time) still ship with NodeJS 0.10 and haven’t updated their NodeJS packages in years either.

The good news is, I’ve worked out ton of these dependencies using many of the current packages available today and also share them on my repository. So although I can’t satisfy the needs of everyone… I can certainly start with my own and share my work in case others are interested! πŸ™‚

The Run Down

This blog focuses on properly providing installable RPMs that follow Red Hat standards. In addition to this, these packages will remain compatible with previous installations of NodeJS:

  • NodeJS v0.12 (from v0.10)
  • npm v3.8.x (from v1.3.x)
  • libuv v.1.9 (from v0.10.x)

Not only that, but I ported over 360+ NodeJS packages into install-able RPMs! They’re certainly not all tested, but it’s a heck of a lot farther then we were before as far as what was available to us.

Installation

Make sure you’ve connected to my repository which is documented here. After that, it’s as simple as the following:

NodeJS

The bread and butter of this entire blog entry. This will haul in the latest libuv packaging as well:

# Run as root (or a user with sudoers permission)
yum install --enablerepo=nuxref nodejs

NPM

If you want to stray away from the 360+ packages I put together, you can use the latest version of npm to haul in your own.

# Run as root (or a user with sudoers permission)
yum install --enablerepo=nuxref npm

Credit

I may not blog often; but I want to re-assure the stability and testing I put into everything I intend share.

If you like what you see and wish to copy and paste this HOWTO, please reference back to this blog post at the very least; it’s really all that I ask of you.

Sources

None of this would have been possible if I hadn’t referenced the following: