As many of you might already know, Rhapsody works under Linux + Firefox using a plugin. Using the plugin, you can listen to their radio stations, sign up for a free account that lets you listen to any 25 songs per month on demand, or sign up for a paid account that lets you listen to anything anytime you want.

For the last year, they have claimed that the plugin does not work with Firefox 1.5... and it was true. Installing the plugin in 1.5 would cause FF to crash everytime you tried to play anything. I have monitored their site every now and then to see when they would support 1.5... no word. I then sent them Email asking why they are supporting only an ancient version of Firefox (1.0 and below)... I got a canned, useless response.

I had kept around an old FireFox 1.0 installation for the sole purpose of using Rhapsody online and use that when necessary. Works, but very inconvenient. On a whim, I decided to try 1.5 again today. The installation of the plugin fails, but the plugin WORKS NOW.

Just allow the installation to fail, download the XPI manually, it is a zip file. Unzip it, and move the nprhapengine.so to your plugins directory and restart Firefox. That's all there is to it.

Apparently there was a change to the plugin. Why they didn't announce it, I don't know. Why they haven't changed anything on their site to remove the requirements for FF 1.0 or less, I don't know. This is the old one I had been using:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2781040 Dec 27 2005 nprhapengine.so
# md5sum nprhapengine.so
ccf17374f625ca18bd24a7b361cacf21 nprhapengine.so

This is the newer one:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2788848 Mar 29 2006 nprhapengine.so
# md5sum nprhapengine.so
1e997cfc25f14ac6d7451dded887d7bc nprhapengine.so

Tested environment: Mandriva Linux 2006.0 32bit, 2.6.12-12mdksmp +
Firefox 1.5.0.7. Thought some of you might find this information to be useful.

thanks CRXSSI , reading your post gave me hope , in that rhapsody does work with linux ...
the installation didn't work for me either .
it trys to install itself to : /home/<user name>/.mozilla/plugins
but , the folder "/plugins" didn't exist in my firefox directory.
so , i created one and ... tada !
thanks again to you and linuxquestions
danny

It is good to share experiences.
Haven't tried it with Firefox 2.0 yet... haven't taken that plunge quite yet.

In other news, the beta of Flash 9 works great under FF 1.5 too!

Hello,
Thank you for the info.

I downloaded from terminal with wget
http://forms.real.com/real/player/do...Inst_Linux.xpi
then unzip the package and placed nprhapengine.so in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.

To get around the firefox 1.0.1 requirement, using the extension useragent switcher https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/59/, I created a new useragent string entry
Description: Firefox/1.0.1

User Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050227 Firefox/1.0.1

App Name: Netscape
App Version: 5.0 (X11; en-US)
Platform:Linux

Works with FF2.0 using the Firefox/1.0.1 string.

I've tried jlo_sandog's method with no success. It brings up the little window like it's going to play the song - it even shows what looks like the proper playing window before jumping right back to the Plugin Installation page. I know for a fact that the plugin is in its proper folder, but it's not showing up in the Firefox extensions.
Has anyone had a similar problem?

I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.1 on Fedora Core 6

I have it working for my playlist and radio stations, no video's. I just put it in /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins. It's listed when I type about: plugins into the browser. Or you could make a soft link if you want to use it for konqueror as well I'd think. Open a konsole (or whatever gnome uses) in the firefox/plugins folder and su to root.
Type in, ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/nprhapengine.so

Happy Holidays,

Larry

I am using FC6, and one last step I needed, after installing the new plugin, was to disable SELinux for this library:

sudo chcon -t texrel_shlib_t ~/.mozilla/plugins/nprhapengine.so