Any plans to have Fedora/CentOS ARM package available?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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There’s currently no Fedora/CentOS ARM packages available for official download. Is there any plan to build these and make them available?

I’m looking into installing Plex Media Server on a ARM-based CentOS 8 raspberry pi. There seems to be a few tools for converting Debian packages to RPM, but haven’t had any success for the plexmediaserver debian ARM.

I’m also open to any other suggestion for install. Thanks!

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Falling squarely into the category of unsupported, don’t do this…

I have a virtual machine running Clear Linux, onto which I was interested in installing Plex Media Server. It has its own native package manager with limited (no, actually) support for other package managers. So, I hand-installed PMS. Here are the steps to do so, as best as I can remember.

  1. Ensure the binutils package for your system is installed. It will include ar which is needed to unpack the .deb package.
  2. Download the appropriate .deb package for your architecture from Plex.
  3. Unpack the package using ar: ar vx plexmediaserver_version.deb.
  4. Unpack the resulting control.tar.gz and data.tar.xz files:
    tar xvf control.tar.gz
    tar xvf data.tar.xz
  5. Move the Plex Media Server binaries in to place:
    sudo cp -r usr/lib/plexmediaserver/ /usr/lib/plexmediaserver
  6. Create the plex user (the location of the “nologin” shell may be different on your system):
    sudo useradd --system --shell /usr/bin/nologin --home /var/lib/plexmediaserver "plex"
  7. Add user plex to the video group:
    sudo usermod -aG video plex
  8. Add the Plex Media Server service to the system:
    sudo cp usr/lib/plexmediaserver/lib/plexmediaserver.service /lib/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service
    sudo systemctl daemon-reload
  9. Create the Plex data directory and give ownership to plex:
    sudo mkdir /var/lib/plexmediaserver
    sudo chown plex:plex /var/lib/plexmediaserver/
  10. Start the Plex Media Server service:
    sudo systemctl start plexmediaserver

At this point PMS should be running.

Some notes:

  • This procedure bypasses every check the normal install process makes to ensure PMS is capable of/suited to running on the system.
  • More information about exactly what the installer actually does can be found in the preinst and postinst scripts in the control.tar.gz archive.
  • I just went through this process on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Raspbian OS to make sure the procedure above works (it did). I don’t have a Pi running CentOS, so I’ve not tested that.
  • To repeat myself, this is a completely unsupported configuration.

My expectation would be that a Pi running Plex Media Server would be wholly devoted to just that purpose. Why not just install the latest Raspbian OS and PMS, and call it good? At least until CentOS ARM package are available.

1 Like
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Thanks @pshanew, the install steps are spot on. PMS is now running on my CentOS 8 Rasbperry Pi and looking well!

Regarding your suggestion, yes I’m thinking of eventually having a dedicated Raspberry for PMS, and Raspbian OS would be my choice. For the time being though, I’m in need of CentOS in this Raspberry for Plex and other stuff I play with.

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No problem, glad it worked.

By the way, to upgrade you should just be able to download the latest version, unarchive it, and copy the /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/ folder contained within to the correct place on the system. That is unless Plex makes other changes (service file, user/group memberships, etc…).

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