My squeezebox has been down for a while, and I had some time this weekend to hack on it.

Tarballs and RPMs from slimdevices failed in different and entertaining ways, so off to Google I went. Much RTFM’ing later, I found a slimserver package in unstable with a nest of dependencies. I run testing, since this is my sole server, and didn’t want to switch to unstable.

Solution: Setup apt-get preferences to allow unstable but prefer stable and testing. Genius!

Instructions on this page. The technique is called apt-pinning.

For some reason, I get no font display on the squeezebox, but at least I have music again. Wish those lusers at slimdevices had made Pandora work on v1 hardware, though.

UPDATED 3/26/06: It looks like the Perl GD library didn’t work on testing due to unstated dependencies on libXft and libpng, and I couldn’t make it work. Instead, I added the Slimdevices apt source to my file and installed their version.

I lost the nice Debian theme, but the display works.