Status of rhythmbox in EPEL9

Greetings,

I’m a recent convert to Rocky Linux. I’m probably not its target audience as I am primarily interested in using it for a laptop workstation (although I do plan to migrate my home web server to it as well).

It’s possible that I don’t know how to ask my question, so please bear with me. I’ll start by identifying my problem: rhythmbox is not currently available in Rocky Linux 9. If I understand the hierarchy correctly, that’s because it’s not even in EPEL9 yet. I have located a bug report asking for it to be added to epel9, but there has been very little activity on it. And as far as I can tell, none of the activity is from actual developers; it’s from people like me hoping it gets added to EPEL9.

So a question for people more knowledgeable than me: does it look like rhythmbox will eventually make it into EPEL9 and by extension Rocky Linux 9? Is there a way to track progress of this kind of development beyond that bug report?

Hi @michael8rown and welcome!

Actually, it sometimes takes some time for a package to be added to the EPEL, even if it existed in a previous iteration of it (i.e., EPEL 8). This was the case for a package that I added a bug report (and also up-voted others’ bug reports) for the rsnapshot package, which is used for backup. It did eventually get built.

Since we (Rocky) don’t control what happens in the EPEL, I can’t promise rhythmbox will be built for 9, but my guess is that it will be.

You can, if you don’t want to wait for the EPEL to pick up rhythmbox, install flatpak and then install rhythmbox. To do that:

sudo dnf install flatpak
sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Then restart your system and then to install rhythmbox:

sudo flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Rhythmbox3

Thank you! I actually did install the flatpak version already. The problem is that the flatpak doesn’t inherit any of the custom GNOME theming I’ve done, nor does it pick up on the system’s “dark mode”. That’s not a deal breaker per se, and I’ll probably use it like that until EPEL builds it for 9, but so far that’s the only component of my daily workstation experience that Rocky can’t fully accommodate for me yet. I just wanted to make sure I understood the chain of command between Rocky and EPEL, and you’ve definitely helped clear that up. I appreciate your insight!

FOLLOWUP: rereading your post, I see that I didn’t use the same install command you recommended. I used

sudo flatpak install flathub rhythmbox

Do you think that would matter? (I’m completely new to flatpak.)

If you got that command to work and install Rhythmbox, then you are probably fine. I’m guessing you’ll get nothing additional from the org.gnome.Rhythmbox. BUT… you could certainly give it a try and see. Just remove rhythmbox first:

sudo flatpak uninstall rhythmbox
sudo flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Rhythmbox

My guess though is that there is an alias that is allowing your command to complete and that it installs the same package.

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Flatpak version of rhythmbox has no iPod support.