Installing Niente

Niente has been extensively tested on the following 'main stream' Linux distros (the links take you to distro-specific installation notes and observations):

• Arch
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• openSUSE Leap
• openSUSE Tumbleweed
• RaspberryPi OS

If your chosen distro is based on one of these 'parent' distros, then Niente will likely work on it, too. Thus, in the Arch family, Niente has been tested to work on Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Garuda Linux and Bluestar Linux. In the Debian family, Devuan, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Peppermint OS, MX Linux and Antix Linux have all been confirmed to work. Practically everything based on Ubuntu is known to work: Linux Mint, Pop!OS, Zorin OS, Tuxedo OS and several others have been given the intensive testing treatment. Not many distros are based on Fedora, but Nobara and Ultramarine are all known to be fine. And so on.

If you are running Windows 10 or 11 on a 64-bit CPU, you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Version 2 (WSL2) and, within that environment, install a Linux distro of your choice: at that point, though your main OS is Windows, you'll be able to install and run Niente in the context of WSL2 as successfully as if you were running the equivalent Linux distro as your main OS. You will first need to install WSL2, for which this article may be helpful. After that, you can follow the standard Niente installation process (see Section 2 below) to get Niente running. You might also want to consult the Windows-specific installation notes for some tweaks and workarounds that will be needed to get Niente working well on this Linux-on-Windows platform.

I should add that Niente is technically unsupported on Windows 11, in the sense that whilst it runs perfectly fine on my various Windows 11 installations, I don't actually own any hardware that is officially supported for running Windows 11 itself. I can't really say I support running Niente on an operating system that I cannot myself get official support for! Nevertheless, I have installed it on Windows 11 on officially-unsupported hardware and it ran perfectly well, except for its CD ripping capabilities (which require direct access to the CD drive, which is unavailable in the Linux environment). Whether that will always be the case, I cannot say: you're basically on your own with Windows 11!

Niente does not support running on anything to do with Apple. Neither will it work on the Solus Linux distro.

The basic installation procedure for any supported operating system is, in a new terminal session:

wget software.bbritten.com/neninst

The installer is small (around 20KB) , so it will take hardly any time to download it. Once the installer has been downloaded, you launch it in the same folder you saved it to, with the command:

bash neninst

You will first see a screen warning you that the installer will make quite a few changes to your system, if you let it:

You need to type 'y' (and then press [Enter]) to proceed. If you type anything else, the installer will terminate without having touched your system at all.

To start with, the Niente installer will check for the presence of various packages on your system and will seek to install any that it finds to be missing. You can usually just let it do it's thing at this point, but if you are interested, here are the packages/programs that Niente deems essential to install:

• bc (program allowing Bash to perform non-integer arithmetic)
• flac (the library that allows FLAC audio files to be read and understood)
• ffmpeg (an audio and video stream interpreter)
• xterm (a terminal emulator or console)
• sqlite3 (a simple database)
• coreutils (a set of essential libraries, providing functionality like MD5 hash computation)
• imagemagick (an image processing program: works with both ImageMagick versions 6.x and 7.x)
• fd or fd-find, depending on distro (a file searching program)
• dialog (a program allowing the creation and display of user input forms for the terminal)
• cuetools (a program allowing the handling of cue sheets for merged FLACs)
• curl (a program to perform file downloads)

If having any of this software installed on your system gives you cause for concern, type 'n' when the installer prompts you and give up on the idea of installing Niente altogether: the program cannot run without all of them being present, I'm afraid.

Once Niente is installed, you can launch it by (a) clicking on the launcher provided on the Desktop (some distros require you to 'trust' or 'mark as executable' the launcher before it will work); or (b) clicking the option provided somewhere in the main menu, which is usually to be found under 'Multimedia' or (depending on distro) 'Sounds & Video'. The main program display should then appear:

Operation of the program beyond this point is hopefully self-explanatory, with the 'top menu' giving access to each of the three main functional components of Niente in turn, plus the various administrative, housekeeping functions::

• Database: The initial creation and population of a database listing every FLAC file in your music collection
• Integrity Checks: Scan the FLAC files listed in the database and extract metadata and physical characteristics from them
• Reporting: Query the database and generate lists of files which fail particular physical or logical consistency tests
• Administration: Various configuration or program management options

In all cases, top-bar menu options can be accessed by right- or left-arrow keys (the menu wraps, so a right-arrow from Quit takes you back to Database, for example), or by tapping the first letter of the menu name (so tapping 'D' gets you directly to Database, 'R' to Reporting and so on). Once a top-bar menu option has been selected, the numbered menu items within that option will be displayed and can be invoked simply by tapping the number associated with the item. Thus tapping 'D', then '4', will invoke the database wiping option; 'I' then '3' will trigger a fast integrity check, and so on.

A handful of options are accessible regardless of which top-bar menu is selected: they are accessible at any time by tapping the letter associated with them (these options are listed on the right-hand side of the main program display area). Thus tapping 'X' will exit the program, whilst tapping'L' will remove the prgram lock (which prevents two file scanning operations from taking place at the same time).

Beyond that quick-start approach, however, you should read the relevant pages elsewhere in the user manual for an exploration (and explanation!) of the rest of the program's functionality,

Summarising things as compactly as I can, then:

• fully update your distro, so that it's using the latest packages and patches
• wget software.bbritten.com/neninst
• bash neninst
• type niente at a command prompt to launch the program, or click on one of the graphical launchers provided

I hope all your Niente Version 4 installations work successfully and that you get up-and-running with the new program quickly and painlessly!

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