I wanted my Acer Aspire One to be able to run
Spotify. I know that it's a proprietary software but it's a good way of showing the music industry that we want alternatives.
So let's begin...
Spotify is aware of the problem that they only got a native client for Windows and Mac OS X but they have a
excellent guide to run the Windows version using Wine, and it looks like they are using a Debian based version of GNU/Linux as well.
I pretty much followed the guide but didn't bother to do the part about opening Spotify URIs from Mozilla Firefox.
What I basicly did was to install Wine, configure audio settings under wine, download the Windows client, run the downloaded file.
There were no hickups what so ever. After running the installer a icon for Spotify turned up under the "Wine" menu category and there I stopped.
I added Spotify to my favourites with a right click and "Add to favourites".
There is one issue that I consider big. Since I'v got the SSD version of the AA1 I want to minimize writing to the disk to make it last longer.
Spotify is a real beast when it comes to caching and writes alot to the disk which I don't want. So what to do?
I made a somewhat ugly hack that works for now but it will make me loose the "Remember me" feature of spotify. What I did was basicly this...
- Identify the username of the user that will be running spotify. In this case he is called "user" so replace that with whatever you are using.
- Start Spotify and go to "Edit->Preferences" and note the path for Cache Location. When you are done shutdown the application completely using "File->Exit"
- In /etc/rc.local I add a small section that sets up a directory under /tmp (that is already using tmpfs and by that not using the SSD).
/etc/rc.local
#spotify cache
if [ ! -e /tmp/spotify ] ; then
mkdir /tmp/spotify
chown user:user /tmp/spotify
fi
As I want to be able to do the rest without having to reboot for folder creation to take place I create the folder manually.
# mkdir /tmp/spotify
- In the path for the cache location I remove the "Storage folder and replace with a link to /tmp/spotify called Storage
# cd [to the cache folder]
# rm -Rf Storage
# ln -s /tmp/spotify Storage
- Start Spotify and check the contents of /tmp/spotify. There should be some folders and perhaps files now.
As I said before you will loose the "Remember me" for your logins because Spotify uses the cache to store information about logged in user.
