To install, just use

# emerge -av amarok

Common problems

mp3 not playing

Nowadays the phonon-backend-xine is deprecated, so you should choose between the gstreamer or the vlc backend. To get the necessary codecs for mp3 playing and a few other rare music formats, use

# emerge media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta

with the appropriate USE flags or just set USE=mp3 in the /etc/make.conf file which will take care of that globally.

Amarok 2 and Mysql Embedded

If you are running Gentoo, more work may be needed to make sure that Amarok is able to properly load your collection. The typical symptom of this problem is Amarok scanning for a while and then no songs showing up in your collection. There are two solutions to this probem

Mysql Embedded as a shared library

1) Set your LDFLAGS to "-Wl,--as-needed" Install the latest ~arch ebuild of mysql or mysql-community, and recompile amarok (with these ldflags)

Mysql Embedded built with -fPIC

Add these two lines to your /etc/portage/env/dev-db/mysql (or mysql-community, if that is what you have installed)

CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -DPIC -fPIC"
CXXFLAGS="${CXXFLAGS} -DPIC -fPIC"

And recompile both mysql and Amarok.

Debugging

If you would like to be able to debug Amarok and other packages under Gentoo, please ensure that either "nostrip" or (better) "splitdebug" is in your FEATURES, that "debug" is set for Amarok in package.use and that and Amarok has been rebuilt with these settings in place. For further information, refer to the Gentoo backtrace guide listed below.

Further information on debugging