Guide to install Spotify - Manual installation. No scripts.

[size=3]This is a guide on how to install Spotify on Opensuse**

Background**[/size]

Spotify is a must-have program that I need regardless of OS and distro but Opensuse is one of the few that has no easy way of installing Spotify while its still 100% possible to get it working.
The solution has been these scripts that works only for a little while. The last script that worked needed to be heavily modified to work every time Spotify released a new binary.
The most recent and working being spotify-easyrpm can be downloaded here: https://software.opensuse.org/package/spotify-easyrpm Hopefully this one will last :slight_smile:
I have not tried spotify-easyrpm. But I experienced the hard way that all those scripts didn’t work after trying all day and night for weeks to install Spotify with no luck.
I had enough so I learned how to do it all manually.

Notes

If you’re looking for a similar guide for manual installation on Debian look here: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux-Windows-Web-Player/solved-Spotify-0-9-4-for-64-bit-Linux/td-p/1169449

  • I was recommended by malcolmlewis to repost my content here after I replied in this thread * Can’t install spotify on Opensuse 13.2 because the thread would be closed.
    This page is a good backup guide in case spotify-easyrpm will break or go unmaintained.
    This guide is mainly a new documentation for me because I lost my digital files. It is assembled in parts by scanning my papers with OCR and looking up saved bookmarks.

    I have done this both on 13.2, leap 42.1, 42.2. Tumbleweed 13.2 and Tumbleweed 42.2.
    **
    I cannot verify It works today. For example on 42.3 or newer. But it worked in December 2016 on 42.2 during x-mas weekends when I was setting up one of my laptops.

Keep this in mind that this is a static installation of Spotify. You will not get any updates on the software because there is no repository added to your system.
This is exactly how I want it. I am in control. If I want to update the software I will do this manually.
If you prefer automated updates I recommend you to take a look at spotify-easyrpm that states that it has somewhat automatic updates via cron. (Don’t quote me on that.)

If something don’t work perhaps you, we or I can find some solution to what’s not working in my guide and PvdMWiki.

The installation

** Dependencies needed to rebuild an .deb to .rpm**
• Alien: https://software.opensuse.org/package/alien
• Rpmbuild: https://software.opensuse.org/package/rpm-build

** Downloading Spotify**
You need to find the binary file of the Spotify version you want to use.
You can find the latest version here on Spotifys server: http://repository.spotify.com/pool/non-free/s/spotify/
But what if you wish to use an older version of Spotify on linux? Black or the oldest grey UI.
Spotify remove the old binary when a new is released so keep your copy if you wish to use it long term.
But luckily there is an archive on github that hosts at least some of these older binaries.
Go to: https://github.com/olejon/spotcommander/wiki/DowngradeSpotify
Download your desired version. Then follow the same steps below.

Installing
Notice:
*Of course you need to replace the name of the file with the one you have when typing the terminal command. *
Guide by PvdMWiki Retrieved from: http://pvdm.xs4all.nl/wiki/index.php/Installing_spotify_on_openSUSE_12.3
This guide shows you how to install spotify client on openSUSE 12.3
As there is no native openSUSE rpm, we will have to make one ourselves.
The big advantage of this method is, that we will always have the latest version, because when a new version is released, we can bake a new rpm ourselves and don’t have to wait on others.

Here are the steps:

  1. browse to http://repository.spotify.com/pool/non-free/s/spotify/ and download the appropriate 32- or 64 bit version.
  2. install the rpm package ‘alien’ to convert .deb to .rpm’s. This can be found in the opensuse repos, to be exact here: http://software.opensuse.org/package/alien
  3. use alien to convert:
#alien -r spotify-clientxxxxx.deb
spotify-client-0.8.4.103.g9cb177b.260-2.x86_64.rpm generated
  1. then, install the rpm:
#zypper in spotify-client*.rpm

you will get a libcrypto dependency error, but you can ignore that, choose 2:

Solution 2: break spotify-client-0.9.0.133.gd18ed58.259-2.x86_64 by ignoring some of its dependencies
  1. typ the following:
 ln -s /usr/lib64/libnss3.so /usr/lib64/libnss3.so.1d
 ln -s /usr/lib64/libnssutil3.so /usr/lib64/libnssutil3.so.1d
 ln -s /usr/lib64/libsmime3.so /usr/lib64/libsmime3.so.1d 
 ln -s libplc4.so /usr/lib64/libplc4.so.0d
 ln -s libnspr4.so /usr/lib64/libnspr4.so.0d
  1. that should do it. Have fun!
    ](http://pvdm.xs4all.nl/wiki/index.php/Installing_spotify_on_openSUSE_12.3)

Installation is now finished!

** Possible additional needed steps** - In the case that Spotify will not launch

Now when your installation is finished there is a possibility that Spotify will not launch when you start it from the start menu.
If you go to the start menu and click on Spotify and it won’t launch we need to find out why its not launching.
Start a terminal. And type spotify. You will get an verbose response.
It will tell you if any dependency is missing. Or what is causing an issue.
Most likely it will be these two or one of these that is missing and needs to be installed

libudev0 https://software.opensuse.org/package/libudev0
libgcrypt11 https://software.opensuse.org/package/libgcrypt11

After installing the missing dependency hopefully Spotify will now launch normally.

Finished

Removing visual ad banners

If you wish to remove visual ads from the horizontal bar popping up you can add these entries to your host file.

127.0.0.1 pubads.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 securepubads.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 media-match.com
127.0.0.1 adclick.g.doublecklick.net
127.0.0.1 www.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 googleads.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 www.omaze.com
127.0.0.1 omaze.com
127.0.0.1 bounceexchange.com
127.0.0.1 rotator.trafficstars.com

Blocking ads on Spotify might be unethical depending on what angle you look at.
The negative is that you are limiting the revenue Spotify and its parts get.
But there are several positive outcomes to this. Mainly blocking out traffic that you don’t wish to enter your network. Remember the ad banner malware hijack last year?
And performance improvements both on your network due to the lower traffic if you have limited bandwidth like I do and your computer not having to deal with the rolling ad requests. Spotify still requests ads but the traffic is rerouted to 127.0.0.1. So there is still a performance gain.

There is no way to remove audio or visual video ads because these runs through audio1.spotify.com and audio2.spotify.com and so on servers unless you can decrypt the traffic.
Its packed in with the audio stream and all other data. So there is no single host that pushes the ads on desktop clients.
On Android an IOS its way easier because it runs through 3’rd party servers easy to block with the host file.

Hi,

I am the author of spotify-easyrpm. I created it because I got bored making the RPM manually every time for a new release and because all the other scripts were either unmaintained or didn’t work!

I wanted to add a few comments which will hopefully be of help

  1. The automatic update is optional :slight_smile: The default run mode always asks whether to install, schedule etc.

  2. spotify-easyrpm is just a bash script so how it works is readable by anyone. You can cherry pick the bash commands inside the script to create the rpm manually and i would suggest you try that as you will get a better rpm compared to using Alien. This brings me to my next point…

  3. I would probably suggest not to recommend the use of Alien to convert deb packages as I have found in the past it doesn’t do a good job and gets into a mess over dependencies and libs - hence the need for the symlinking and zypper force install

Spotify-easyrpm extracts the debian package and then builds the rpm using the rpmbuild tool against an rpm spec file (which is inside the script). This ensures there are no dependencies or lib issues

  1. spotify-easyrpm isn’t going anywhere :smiley:

Cheers and thx for recommending easyrpm

New user, so please give any advice with instructions that are as clear and precise as possible on what to actually do. I get the following error message:

dcnblues@linux-hk2f:~> sudo zypper install spotify-easyrpm
root's password:
Refreshing service 'service'.
Unexpected exception.
Parse error: repoindex.xml[23] Opening and ending tag mismatch: meta line 21 and head
Please file a bug report about this.
See http://en.opensuse.org/Zypper/Troubleshooting for instructions.
dcnblues@linux-hk2f:~> df /
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3       41946112 23767736  17848552  58% /