I have now managed to get Squeezecenter running on my QNAP TS-109 II. Squeezecenter is the server a Squeezebox network music player connects to in order to get hold of its music.

Since the QNAP TS-109 II is running on the ARMEL architecture, installation was a little bit tricky.

Squeezecenter is written in Perl. Let me state early that Perl is not my favourite programming language.

I installed the Debian package of Squeezecenter 7.3 available Slimdevices web. The package’s architecture is all, which is not true - it contains Perl XS code compiled for i386 and amd64. This code won’t run on ARMEL.

The Squeezecenter package also ships lot’s and lot’s of third party Perl modules, but they don’t work on Perl 5.10 because of module version conflicts. I run Debian Lenny on the QNAP, and guess which Perl version is shipped with Lenny… Yep, Perl 5.10.

I found an excellent forum post by “bugfixer” at the squeezebox forums explaining how to get Squeezecenter running on Perl 5.10. Much of the information in this blogpost comes from that post.

The shipped perl modules are all available as Debian packages - with one exception - the libjson-xs-perl package in Debian lacks the file /usr/lib/perl5/JSON/XS/VersionOneAndTwo.pm, so I had to copy that one from the version shipped with squeezecenter.

The squeezecenter Debian package also has a large amount of dependencis not listed in the package’s metadata. And to add to the misery, it requires the perl package Encode::Detect, which is not even available as Debian package.

To avoid having to keep track of this mess, I created a puppet class which installs all dependencies, installs squeezecenter, and then removes all files which cause trouble. With that work done, I can reinstall squeezecenter and be pretty sure it will work. I did an upgrade of squeezenter today by downloading the new squeezecenter debian package, installing it, then ran puppet to move away all the offending perl classes - worked as a charm!

So, if you want a list of all packages required and all files that must be moved, refer to the source for my squeezecenter puppet class. That list will be kept more up to that than if I would list the info on this blog post.

I’ll be back with some info on the performance when running Squeezecenter on the QNAP. I can say already that it’s not blazingly fast..