Got Roon? Have you put it in a flatpak?

One of the big things here at Dismal Manor is music listening using Roon and Qobuz. Roon is a properly architected music server and endpoint software from Harman International. The Soloos mob did the original work, were acquired, and then sold to Harman who is ocntinuing development.

For music lovers, Roon is highly recommended. It’s bit-perfetc plabyack, has a killer library manager, and great artist bios and recording reviews and a wizard recommendations and radio scheme.

Roon has a Core, tablet and phone controllers, and streaming endpoints which can be commercial or DIY Raspberry Pi cobbler.

I had been running ROCK (a NUC-tailored image with minimal drivers) for my Roon core. Yesterday, I decided to move it to Rocky Linux so did an install and had fun getting Roon to link and run.

After a day of trying various charms, jinxes, and profanity, we are almost there.

Roon.app people compile Roon core for several architectures and distribute binary images plus instructions. Anyway, it is getting increasingly hard to wrangle all the sound-related dependencies as various distros have differeing respect for FOSS purity with regard to FFMPEG etc. Several package names have changed since I last did this drill.

Harman has not yet discovered docker, flatpak, or podman for the DIY community. But they do make their own “Nucleus” core hosts with ROCK (Roon Optimized Core Kit) playing on them.

The box we’re on here is from System 76, a mid-spec Meerkat system. I have Rocky on it but not much of the 45Drives packages.

At the moment, I’m trying to get my controller to talk to the server. It’s doing that now that SElinux is in a corner and ports are open. But it’s still in a tail chase restoring my DB and credentials. I’ll pester roon about that.

I’m tempted to tinker with the distribution kit to see if I can flatpak it. No idea how to get started though. Any hints?