Spotify is an excellent streaming media service! They have, in fact, successfully garnered all of my music consumption. Their players for iOS and Android are, similarly, quite excellent! Unfortunately, though, they have yet to release a version 1.0 for Linux.
I was excited when my workstation announced the inclusion of an updated version of Spotify in their software repo.
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
With a quick update of my system, I was on my way to enjoying the latest version of Spotify. Upon completion of the upgrade, though, I was most dismayed to find that Spotify would not start but, rather, crashed with the following errors:
spotify: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found
spotify: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found
spotify: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found
Their most recent update to the “Linux Preview” version of their software breaks in Debian Wheezy (Debian 7) due to the Debian repository’s reliance on EGLIBC version 2.13 (the 0.9.11 version of Spotify is built against the newer 2.15 GLIBC library). This has been the cause of a great deal of consternation among its Linux user base. Whilst there have been many suggestions as to how to resolve this issue — including upgrading GLIBC, an idea which is rather ill-conceived in my opinion given the pervasive use of this library throughout the system and Debian’s extensive testing of the software in the official repo against this version of the library — the simplest solution is to simply downgrade to the previous 0.9.4 release.
Due to another tedious library dependency incompatibility with Debian Wheezy — Spotify requires libssl 0.9.8 while Debian, naturally, uses the latest 1.0.0 version — I had previously downloaded the Debian package from the Spotify repository in order to facilitate a manual installation. (I’ve uploaded this same package here for convenience.) First, we need to disable the Spotify repository from the APT package manager’s repository list. Simply edit /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out (add a ‘#’ to the beginning of the line) the entry for the Spotify repo as follows:
# commented out Spotify repo due to GLIBC errors in Debian Wheezy
#deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free
Now, update APT’s cache of the repos:
$ sudo apt-get update
To finish it up, a quick run of ‘dpkg’ to install the previous version of Spotify (instructing dpkg to install the package whilst ignoring its libssl0.9.8 dependency as we’ve satisfied this previously):
$ sudo dpkg --ignore-depends=libssl0.9.8 -i spotify-client_0.9.4.183.g644e24e.428-1_amd64.deb
… and we’re back in business!
Update: The latest Debian Project News release indicates that Debian is moving back to GLIBC from EGLIBC. Perhaps this will result in the project upgrading the version of the library it uses and solve this problem inherently? To quote DPN 7/3/2014:
Debian is moving (back) to GLIBC
——————————–
Five years ago Debian moved from using GLIBC to the EGLIBC fork as the
standard C library. Now that course of action is being reversed and
Debian is switching back to GLIBC [16] due to the demise of the EGLIBC
project and the dissolution of the GLIBC steering committee [17]. With
the GLIBC committee gone, GLIBC became open for peer review, shared
repositories, removal of the ports/ directories, and has had most of the
important EGLIBC features merged back into it. The new glibc package is
available in experimental.
16: http://blog.aurel32.net/175
17: https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-03/msg01038.html
Fingers crossed …