All of a sudden my jellyfin installation stopped working. sudo systemctl status jellyfin.service would report "failed" with unhelpful messages. Running journalctl revealed that jellyfin could no longer find the "jellyfin-web" directory, which is where jellyfin keeps the elements for displaying data over the web.
Nothing I have tried has resolved this issue. I have gone so far as to remove everything remotely related to jellyfin from my system (22.04.5 LTS), including the sources from apt, the keyring, the data directories -- everything.
Never mind that I have now lost several months of gathering, sorting data, creating collections, and setting up my system. For some reason, Jellyfin refuses to re-install and work.
At one point, I had the program running when I started it directly, but it spewed output to the terminal even when I put it in the background. However, it woule refuse to behave when I attempted to enable it as a service (sudo systemctl enable jellyfin.serivce). When I invoked it as sudo systemctl start jellyfin.service it would continue to throw the "failed" message and refuse to start.
Jellyfin hasn't been updated on my system in a while, so I'm suspecting a system update of some sort has re-worked my system. I have a thread started on the jellyfin forum, but so far, no joy.
Incidentally, I've attempted to use AI to diagnose and resolve this issue, but as almost always , AI gets it wrong. It's like walking me up to a door, knocking, and then walking away. Oops.
if your data is on remote sources (eg. NAS) maybe permissions changed and jellyfin cannot find them. journalctl -xe should give you an idea what has failed. I've installed jellyfin many times on various pc's, pulls data from my NAS, did not have any issue. My notes on jellyfin:
curl -s https://repo.jellyfin.org/install-debuntu.sh | sudo bash
systemctl status jellyfin.service
configure it
point to movies and greek movies
done
Having jumped through a number of hoops and ladders, I figured I'd probably horked my system big time and decided now would be a good time to upgrade from 22.04.5 LTS to 24.04.3 (how can I confirm it's an LTS release?). As usual, I have to re-enable software that was disabled during the upgrade, and I need to reconfigure some services, such as xrdp.
I've enabled the jellyfin.sources repository but haven't yet tried to install the program itself. If it fails now, I'll probably ditch it, although I've grown to prefer it over plexmediaserver. Still, if it doesn't work it doesn't work, and the hassle of making it work is an example (imo) of why many people avoid Linux.
ETA: lsb_release -d tells me the full version information:
Jellyfin Marks 7 Years With Major Desktop App Changes
Jellyfin confirms the new desktop app is now available on Flathub and Arch AUR for Linux users, with Windows and macOS builds still pending.
On the client side, Jellyfin has announced a rebrand of its desktop application. Jellyfin Media Player is being renamed to Jellyfin Desktop. The most impactful technical change behind the rebrand is the migration from Qt 5 to Qt 6, which developers report has already led to noticeable performance improvements.
Keep in mind that the new Jellyfin Desktop does not migrate saved servers or settings from the previous application.
This might be the problem Fred:
Finally, note that Jellyfin Desktop does not currently support Ubuntu 24.04 LTS because its Qt stack remains at version 6.4. The new desktop client depends on mpvqt, which requires Qt 6.5 or newer, making official support impractical until the distribution updates its Qt packages.
Thanks, Jim. Just as they say, "No good deed goes unpunished," my attempting to "modernize" my server by upgrading to 24.04.3 LTS has brought with it no end of complications. I can no longer get xrdp to work, and apparently Ubuntu MATE has removed its own built-in "Desktop sharing" feature (which used RDP). So, because I dislike sitting in front of my console in my office and prefer a remote session, I'm now using NoMachine for my remote needs. Given that my Mac laptop's screen dimensions differ from my server's, I have to configure things to my liking, and I have to get used to the differences. I'm also reverting back to plex (good thing I didn't remove it).
It's often difficult to switch from one way of doing things to another, but in this case, it seems I have no choice.
Parallels Client for Mac seems to have not been updated to work smoothly with 24.04 (yet) although it worked better than other choices with 22.04. So, after spending a day trying various means to get it to work, I abandoned it and although NoMachine works, it has some idiosyncratic behaviors with Mac's menubar and Mission Control spaces. Therefore, after a fresh re-install of xrdp I got it working with Microsoft Remote Desktop (now named Windows App). I have both the beta version as well as the App Store product, and both of them work with a minimum of work. In the past I had some weirdness with keyboard mapping, but change in the client appears to have resolved those.
Now I have to wait for Jellyfin to be updated for 24.04.