Notices

Hi Misty. I've updated the first post with a link to the wiki page discussing enabling root on your device.

You may want to wait until some of the current issues have been smoothed out before following the instructions though, as a lot of people seem to having some trouble. Or if you have a brave and adventurous spirit try again after enabling rootsh and I'll try to help with any problems along the way!

Cheers,
Jan

I wouldn't worry about the timestamp. Try this next:

This should directly execute the iplayer-dl script and spit out some usage instructions. Previously we were using links and aliases so hopefully this should help get to the bottom of things.

Cheers,
Jan

Sorry to butt in.
When you arrive at this stage, press Y and then enter. It might have aborted after a timeout if you left it a while before responding.

The terminal is asking you to confirm that you want to download the extra components needed to make iplayer work. Looks to me like your almost there. Keep at it.

There's a difference between blunt and rude. Why would anyone even try to help you if this is what they can expect? If I were a professional tutor that you were paying to teach you "Linux for beginners" I could almost understand your response.

I will try to help you, but you're going to have to also help yourself. So, instruction 1:

Don't do anything you don't understand. If it's not clear what you're doing, either do a google search if you're impatient, or ask and wait until someone has time to answer.

In my first post I mistakenly assumed that everyone would follow this rule. My apologies again. My only defence is that my line of work is not teaching people the fundamentals of linux. I've edited now so hopefully it won't happen to anyone else.

As digbum says, you're nearly there. Type "Y" at that prompt and it should install iplayer-dl. As part of the installation, a link to the iplayer-dl executable is made in the /usr/bin/ directory.

This is a special directory, in that any executable inside it can be run from the command line from any location by typing its name. Therefore after this step you should be able to run iplayer-dl from the command line by simply typing:

If you do this it should spit out some usage instructions. Some people seem to be having problems at this stage, so if you also do, be patient while we try and work out the problem. It's difficult when things work perfectly well on your own device to troubleshoot a problem on other people's!

By default, if you type
On the command line it will download the show to your current location. Your N900's storage is split into a few pieces called partitions. It's not a good idea to fill any of these up! When you start a terminal, your starting location is in the "application storage" part, which is 2GB. Therefore if you open a terminal and just type iplayer-dl URL, it will put the show into your application storage and it will quickly fill up.

You can solve this by either navigating to the place you wish to store the file before running iplayer-dl (which would be a pain), or by use the optional "-d" flag. i.e. if you type:

it will save the video to /home/user/MyDocs/.videos, which is the best place for it. It would be a pain to type this out every time, so instead you can create an alias. In order to do this you need to put the following line into your /home/user/.profile file:

Since many people struggle with using terminal based text editors, an easy way of doing this is with the command I supplied earlier.

If you type:

on the command line all it will do is print "Big Phat Jan is great" on your screen. That is what the echo command does. If you add on a special redirection symbol, ">>" that means that the results of the command will instead be appended to the end a file that you specify after the symbol. So typing:

Is just the same as using a text editor to add the alias command to the file /home/user/.profile , but (I thought) a bit easier. This file is only read every time you start up a new terminal, hence the need to close and reopen the terminal before the new "iplayer" command will work. Alternatively, you could force your current terminal to read the file by typing:

Unfortunately it looks like you have done the echo command while still root (could be a problem with the instructions - I'll check after finishing this post), which means that "user" doesn't have the right to edit the file any more. This is bad! You can change the ownership using the following commands:

Whenever you've finished doing a command to be done as root you should type "exit" to return you to a normal non-root shell.

OK, that done, you can check the contents of this file using the "cat" command. All this command does is print the contents of a file. So typing:

Should print the contents to your screen. If you see the iplayer alias all is well. It's unclear from your message whether the alias has somehow split itself over two lines. If so, you will need to remove it and put it in again on one line. As you don't have any other aliases set up, the easiest way would be to do:

rm /home/user/.profile
echo 'alias iplayer="iplayer-dl -d /home/user/MyDocs/.videos"' >> /home/user/.profile

Making sure that the echo command is all on one line.

When you've done all of this, "iplayer URL" should work. Let me know if you have difficulting understanding or executing any of these commands.

Cheers,
Jan

To anyone having problems, I've corrected three potential sources of them in my first post. They are as follows:

1. You need to have rootsh installed or "sudo gainroot" won't work.

2. You need to be user when echoing the alias to your /home/user/.profile file, or root will own the file (which is bad!)

You can test this using:

If you see "root" there at all then you need to change this to "user" with the following command.

3. The "code" tags on this forum seem to introduce line breaks depending on your screen resolution and size! I think that this is what has caused most of the problems (and this would explain why some people are having problems and others aren't).

The "echo ..." command needs to all be on one line. If this is not the case you need to edit the /home/user/.profile file and make sure it is. If this is the only alias you have, then the easiest way would be to delete the file and then redo the command making sure there are no line breaks, i.e.

It seems that pasting the echo command outside of the code tags would solve the new line problem, so here it is:

echo 'alias iplayer="iplayer-dl -d /home/user/MyDocs/.videos"' >> /home/user/.profile

If you do have other aliases your best option would be to use a text editor to edit the file instead.

Cheers,
Jan

Just a small word of warning if you are enabling Extras-dev repository to get rootsh or any other programme make sure you disable it afterwards before issuing
apt-get update
Saves a lot of heart ache.

Hi Casper,

I'm pretty sure rootsh is in Extras, not Extras-devel. At least according to the wiki it is.

It's good advice to bear in mind for extras-devel anyway, though we don't want to spook people into disabling Extras by mistake!

Cheers,
Jan

Hi Jan
Thanks for all of your excellent help thus far. When I try that command it doesn't find iplayer-dl.

Guys....
I know you might be frustrated at not getting this to work but remember, people like Jan and Kaspernj are giving their precious time to help us out and very often are helping late at night. I had a reply from Jan last night that was about 1:00am ish in the morning so give these guys a break.

Unless otherwise specified the instructions and help that these guys give are are not 100% complete and error free as they are not paid support and are often responding to our questions amidst doing their own work.

Give them a break they are doing a great job and I for one value their assistance.

Thanks c-b. Can you post the exact error message?

Cheers,
Jan