Running Museeq on Mac OS X

I recently stumbled across an interesting soulseek client, museek+ It is broken down into a daemon backend and several frontends (GTK, QT, and even a console one). Best of all, the backend and frontends can communicate over UNIX socket or TCP connection, which raises the possibility of running the frontend on a completely different machine from the backend. This appeals to me greatly.

I installed the backend on a Xen virtual machine running at my home (just install museekd and museekd-toolson any recent version of Debian or Ubuntu). I used musetup to configure the backend, being sure to add a connection interface on the public interface in addition to the loopback interface.

To get a frontend working on Mac OS X requires MacPorts and a couple of steps. The GTK frontend is simple to get running, but is not full functional at the time of this posting. The QT frontend requires a bit more work though. Assuming you followed the above link and have XCode and MacPorts installed, then open up Terminal.app and follow these steps:
[cc lang=”bash” ]
sudo /opt/local/bin/port install qt4-mac
sudo /opt/local/bin/port install subversion
sudo /opt/local/bin/port install cmake
sudo /opt/local/bin/port install libevent
sudo /opt/local/bin/port install swig
sudo /opt/local/bin/port install swig-python
svn checkout http://www.museek-plus.org/svn/museek+/trunk/sources museek+
cd museek+
cmake -DPREFIX=/opt/local/ -DNO_MUSCAN=1 -DNO_MUSEEKD=1 -DNO_SETUP=1
make
sudo make install
[/cc]

That should be all you need to get the museeq frontend installed on your system. Now just run museeq from the terminal or use a simple applescript to create launcher application you can put in the dock. It may even be possible to get the daemon to compile properly on Mac OS X, but I didn’t really try as I really wasn’t interested. I like the split configuration, as I can run the daemon on a virtual machine at home and still connect to it when I’m at work and check on my downloads without actually trying to run a p2p client on the office network.