As I mentioned yesterday, I acquired a new computer and backed up the data on the old machine. Then I spent most of the day today playing with my new toy and tweaking it to my liking.
To install Arch Linux on Marigold, I used Lifehacker’s beginner guide to Arch and the beginner guide on the Arch website. The claim on the Lifehacker post is that you’ll learn all about Linux in the process. Maybe it’s my own previous experience with Linux that puts me at a level that’s somewhere past the ultra-newbie, but following the directions made almost everything in the instructions really straightforward. A good bit of the Lifehacker guide, at least the parts of the guide that didn’t say things like “don’t worry about this”, showed stuff I already knew or could figure out with reasonable ease.
By the end of the afternoon, after I had unhooked my old computer, hooked up my new computer, cleaned my old mouse (it was getting kind of gross, and I decided to keep using it for now), and eaten lunch, I had a shiny new Arch Linux installation on my system. Thanks to some smart backing up I didn’t have to tweak a thing in my Firefox settings (yay), but Amarok was another story altogether, primarly because I’ve never used it in any great depth before.
And then it wouldn’t scrobble my tracks to Last.fm even though I had definitely enabled the Last.fm plugin and logged in. The test login worked beautifully. I could love a track on Last.fm just fine. I ran Amarok from the console in debug mode thanks to the advice of someone in the Amarok IRC channel. Nothing weird came up. I disabled KDE Wallet (the program that encrypts your passwords) and stored my Last.fm password in plaintext temporarily to see if that would work, even though that bug was fixed. Nothing. The same person in #amarok suggested trying to scrobble in another program. I tried scrobbling in Rhythmbox. Nothing, but I could still love a track. Pandora and Grooveshark scrobbled fine after installing NTP (a program that syncs your time with other time servers). Fire.fm did not.
So I’ve got nothing. This is a new computer, so the problem is most likely misconfiguration, as someone in #archlinux said. But misconfiguration of what? I’ve configured the time. These programs have no dependencies in common. I am definitely logged in to Last.fm and have enabled scrobbling. I’ve got nothing. I’ll do more investigating tomorrow with the official Last.fm client packaged for Arch. We’ll see what happens.