I love Spotify. I know it has a bit of a bad rap in some circles, but it fills the perfect niche in my music listening life, and while they do provide a very impressive web interface, you really can’t beat the power and flexibility of their desktop client.

However, there’s a problem. I also love Linux.

This actually wouldn’t be that much of a problem if I happened to use Ubuntu, or some other Debian based distribution of Linux. But I like Fedora. And that’s where things get a bit more complex for the average Linux user.

While Spotify does, impressively, offer a Linux client; they only provide a .deb package which doesn’t make my life easy as Fedora User. However the only reason they haven’t created an .rpm package for the client, is simply the fact that they haven’t made one. The requirements of the client aren’t all that complex; and, with a little work, the .deb package contents can be modified to run on Fedora.

That being said: who want to do that? Luckily, there are easier options. All for which we can thank a sainted Github user who goes by ‘leamas‘.

leamas is the maker of a very interesting tool called LPF (Local Package Factory), which enables the redistribution of non-redistributable, or EULA encumbered packages. It’s a pretty nifty idea, and an LPF package for Spotify does exist, but I couldn’t seem to get it to work for me.

Luckily leamas has another trick up his/her sleeve: spotify-make.

This repo is basically just a makefile and associated depended upon libraries which aims to make it possible to easily install the Spotify debian package in a “distro independent way”. And this thing worked like a charm for me.

All you need to do is clone the repo, run the configure script and three make commands and you’re good to go. The Spotify client should be available in your applications menu (though you may need to enable the Sound & Video menu section in Menu Config if it isn’t already).

sudo -i
cd /usr/local/src
git clone https://github.com/leamas/spotify-make.git
cd spotify-make
./configure
make download
make install && make register

Ta-da…

(supposedly there’s another project to do something sort of similar to this calledspotify-rpm, which leamas actually contributed to, but I haven’t tested it.)

Update:

If after you’ve upgraded to a newer version of Fedora the Spotify client won’t start, you may have a library dependency problem. Try running these commands to update and reinstall (which hopefully will fix it):

sudo -i
cd /usr/local/src/spotify-make
make uninstall && make clean
git pull
./configure
make download
make install && make register