If you want to get MPD (Music Player Daemon) working in a hard drive install of Wolvix Cub 1.1.0, you'll have to compile MPD from source, as it's not in any of the Slackware 11.0 repositories. First, however, you'll have to create the proper build environment to make compiling from source possible. This involves installing both the development module (meta-development-1.1.0-noarch-3wlv.tgz) and the cub-headers (cub-headers-1.1.0-noarch-2wlv.tgz). This can be accomplished either by using gslapt or slapt-get or by downloading the file and running installpkg (see the installpkg man page for details). I'd provide links to the required packages, but I believe the availability of the repositories is still somewhat in flux. Last I checked, the only place to find the required packages was at
http://wolvix.oithona.com/wolvix/wolvix-1.1.0/.
Once the necessary build environment exists, compiling MPD follows the usual format: first "./configure", then "make", and then "make install". While this usually goes fairly smoothly, sometimes the compiler can't find all the necessary dependencies, even when they're installed. Specifically, I ran into issues with both FLAC (necessary for playing FLAC files) and libmad (necessary for playing MP3 files), though of course your mileage may vary.
The compiler found FLAC after I reinstalled it, but no such luck with libmad. I even tried building libmad from source, figuring that this would take care of any remaining issues, but still no go.
So I took a look at the log files that were created by ./configure. There I learned that the compiler uses pkg-config to sort out all the configuration options; pkg-config, in turn, figures out which programs are installed by looking for files with a ".pc" extension. I looked for the libmad .pc file on my computer but couldn't find it anywhere.
A quick search on the internet, however, revealed both (a) a bug in the program that prevents the .pc file from being created when building libmad from source and (b) a sample .pc file for libmad. I customized the .pc file for use with my machine, copied it to the correct location, tried compiling MPD from source one last time, and finally experienced the sweetness of success.
One further note, for those who are interested: MPD uses fewer resources than XMMS, in part because it doesn't require either X or a window manager. I recently conducted a *very* informal test by playing the same FLAC file in several different ways on a 1998 ThinkPad series 1400. CPU usage when running X, blackbox, XMMS, and htop was about 34%; CPU usage when running X, blackbox, MPD, and htop was about 24%; CPU usage when running just MPD and htop was about 18%. On old hardware like this, every little bit helps (htop itself, if you can believe it, was using about 4 or 5% of the CPU).
If you see any errors in the above information or have any suggestions for improving this how-to, please let me know. I'd have included more of the details, but unfortunately my memory just isn't what it used to be. :-)
