Although it doesn’t officially end until 21 September, the best days of summer are gone, so I’m using the title of a single by British band Disco Inferno to post again after two months of inactivity.

This has been a good summer overall. I went a lot to the beach, attended many concerts, spent a lot of time with my friends and met people who I thought I’d never meet again. But everything has an end (and holidays too) so I’m back again at work.

I’ll seize this post to tell you that I’ve just updated my Last.fm backports for Debian and Ubuntu.

It seems that Last.fm’s protocol has changed recently, and older versions of the client have problems skipping and banning songs. This obviously affects unofficial clients as well.

So although you still can play songs in the old player, now you need at least version 1.3 of the client to do it properly. This is bad news for sarge and dapper users, as Last.fm 1.3 requires a version of Qt too recent for those distributions. Those using etch, edgy or feisty can still benefit from my backports. Users of more recent distros can install the official Debian packages created by John Stamp.

For those interested, the semi-official Debian backports (not compiled by me) are also available at backports.org so sooner or later my work with Last.fm won’t be necessary anymore. I hope that it has been useful during all this time 🙂