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Installing on Slackware

Installing Freevo on the oldest still maintained distribution of Linux. Slackware is a slow changing ultra stable platform wiht out a lot of fancy automagic updaters or configuration tools. This lack of "features" is one of its strengths as an HTPC platform. Once you have it set up it will just run with no suprises.

Slackware install

Start with a basic install of Slackware. You will need to install the A,AP,N,L,K,X, and XAP groups. If you are going to need to configure lirc you will also probably need the D group to be able to compile it. Before going on make sure you have a working install of Slackware and make sure that your Xorg.conf file is setup correctly

Installing Freevo and configuring Slackware specific options

Next step will be to install rest of the needed packages. The complete is under Freevo packages at the end of the page. After installing all the packages the real fun can begin. From the command line run: 

freevo setup

This command will attempt to auto configure the basic settings. Next check that the following line is in the /etc/freevo/localconfig.py, otherwise Xine will fail silently: 

XINE_HAS_NO_LIRC = False

Uncomment the following line in /etc/fstab: 

/dev/cdrom      /mnt/cdrom       auto        noauto,owner,ro  0   0

Finishing Touches

It is always nice to thumbnails to go with the video names in the directory listings. When first adding a lot of videos to a freevo directory, it can be very slow to let freevo detect new videos and generate thumbnails. A faster way is to tell freevo to go a ahead and pre-generate teh thumbnail cache before you actually start to use the directory: 

 freevo cache --video-thumbs --recursive --directory=<VIDEO DIRECTORY>

This command will run the video thumbnailer against every video in every subdirectory of the target directory. It can take some time if you have a lot of videos, but when it is done you will be able quickly browse directories of thumbnailed videos with out waiting.

To always have updated TV guide, add create /etc/cron.hourly/tv_guide.sh containing the following: 

 #!/bin/bash
 /usr/bin/freevo tv_grab > /tmp/TV.log 2>&1

Remember to set the file to executable with: 

 chmod +x /etc/cron.hourly/tv_guide.sh

Freevo Packages

In additon to the the software on the Slackware CD's you will also need the following packages, they are available at FreshTGZ. Currently the simplest way to get the software is to use swaret, also available at FreshTGZ. A meta-package is in development to ease this stage.

Optional extra packages:

2014-02-15 05:47