Although Centos is often considered a server OS (it is indeed a very good server OS), it can be used quite successfully as a desktop. In fact, I use it as one of my primary desktop OS's (the other being Debian Lenny). As of this writing, Centos 5.2 is the latest version of Centos. Because Centos is supposed to be 100% binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this article applies to RHEL 5 as well.

Amarok is a very nice media player that runs natively in KDE (K Desktop Environment). If you are using KDE as your desktop, using Amarok to play music files is an easy decision. If you are using Gnome, you can still use Amarok but you'll need to install a bunch of QT packages which may or may not be in your interest. On my Debian system running Gnome, I prefer to use Rhythmbox instead of Amarok.

Amarok is unfortunately not included in the main Centos repositories. However, it is included in the EPEL repository, which makes installation a snap. EPEL is basically a repository of Fedora packages compiled on RHEL-based platforms, i.e. Centos. To use EPEL, first download and install the EPEL repo package, which can be found at the EPEL website.

# rpm -Uvh epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

Once the EPEL package is installed, edit /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo. Add the following line to the end of the block that starts with [epel]:

protect=0

Assuming that you have the protectbase plugin installed and working (you should!), this will prevent EPEL packages from upgrading/replacing base Centos packages.

Now that you have the EPEL repository setup correctly, we can install Amarok:

# yum install amarok

Depending on what packages are already installed in your system, you may need to install a number of other packages to satisfy dependencies. After installing, you can run Amarok from KDE's Multimedia menu.

If after installing, MP3s still do not play (no sound), you may need to install some additional packages. My installation of Amarok is using the xine engine, which was installed and working prior to my installation of Amarok. The steps to install the xine engine are similar to those for installing Amarok.

If visualizations in Amarok do not work, you may need to install the libvisual package.