BBC iPlayer on Fedora F11

itsjustarumour · #1 3rd July 2009, 09:00 PM

Hi all,

Has anybody managed to get the BBC iPlayer to successfully install on Fedora 11?

Originally when I tried, installation stopped half way through with an "Error# 2004" message.

I read somewhere that on Fedora 11 the BBC iPlayer needed the gtk2-devel and rpm-devel packages to be installed - I'm using KDE 4.2 rather than GNOME for my desktop, but I installed these anyway. The next time I tried to install iPlayer, everything seemed to work OK and the installation completed. But I when I click on my new "BBC iPlayer" desktop icon, the app starts to open and appears in my taskbar for a second but then closes down again.

Adobe AIR seems to be installed OK, and I've installed a couple of Adobe AIR apps just to check and they work fine....

Any ideas, anyone?

virason · #2 3rd July 2009, 09:15 PM

have you tried running get_iplayer from the command line? I have had good results with it on f10.

Details at http://linuxcentre.net/getiplayer/documentation/

itsjustarumour · #3 3rd July 2009, 09:49 PM

Hi Virason,

Thanks for the link, but the get_iplayer thing is something different. What I'm trying to get running is the official BBC iPlayer desktop from http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.u...player_desktop Its only available for the UK though due to licensing issues!

itsjustarumour · #4 9th July 2009, 08:51 PM

Bump. Anyone?

John the train · #5 9th July 2009, 09:12 PM

The last time I checked on iPlayer Desktop it appeared that it was only available as a .deb package, Fedora should be supported, but the .rpm package seems to be AWOL.

Gödel · #6 9th July 2009, 09:46 PM

right-click on the icon, copy the command line to a terminal, run it from there, post any error messages.

itsjustarumour · #7 10th July 2009, 11:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John the train

The last time I checked on iPlayer Desktop it appeared that it was only available as a .deb package, Fedora should be supported, but the .rpm package seems to be AWOL.

Well, there certainly appears to be something strange going on as according to the info at http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.u...p_requirements it should work on:

Fedora Core 10
Ubuntu 8.10
Open Suse 11

However, the actual download page at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/install/ only offers options for:

Mint Linux 6
OpenSUSE 10.3
Ubuntu 8.10

I wonder what they know that they're not telling us...

itsjustarumour · #8 10th July 2009, 12:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gödel

right-click on the icon, copy the command line to a terminal, run it from there, post any error messages.

Thanks for the post. I tried that, but the output doesn't include an error messages or other clues. "System Monitor" does show "BBC iPlayer Desktop" as running however - but the window just isn't displayed...

Strange!

Gödel · #9 12th July 2009, 12:31 PM

I don't know if this helps, but this is how I installed BBC iPlayer in F11 x86_64 Gnome desktop

Quote:

yum install gtk2-devel.i586 nss.i586 libxml2-devel.i586 libxslt.i586 gnome-keyring.i586 rpm-devel.i586 PackageKit-gtk-module.i586 bug-buddy.i586

Then I installed Adobe AIR for linux

Code:

chmod u+x Download/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
Download/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Then I restarted, and launched the iplayer installer from http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/install/

And it all works.

Gödel · #10 12th July 2009, 12:47 PM

ah, one last requirement in x86_64, if you are using pulseaudio then you also need

Code:

yum install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i586

anonymouse · #11 12th July 2009, 05:27 PM

When I try this the iPlayer installation fails with "Error 5100". Air seems to install OK. Does anyone else have this?

Update: just tried TweetDeck, and I have the same problem. One question - should Air be installed as root or as a user? I installed as root.

itsjustarumour · #12 12th July 2009, 06:13 PM

@Godel - thanks for the posts. I'll give that a try when I can - I can't at the moment as I can't download some of the packages I need right now due to the current problems with the Fedora repos/servers!

Gödel · #13 12th July 2009, 06:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by anonymouse

When I try this the iPlayer installation fails with "Error 5100". Air seems to install OK. Does anyone else have this?

Update: just tried TweetDeck, and I have the same problem. One question - should Air be installed as root or as a user? I installed as root.

The Air installer can be run as non-root, but if you have all the required packages (as listed above) it should bring up a window to prompt for root password during the install.

However, afterwards, you need to run the Air Application installer as root

Code:

su -c '/usr/bin/Adobe\ AIR\ Application\ Installer'

Gödel · #14 12th July 2009, 07:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by itsjustarumour

@Godel - thanks for the posts. I'll give that a try when I can - I can't at the moment as I can't download some of the packages I need right now due to the current problems with the Fedora repos/servers!

One further thing, after initial install it started up and displayed a message about not being able to save, I ignored that and exited. Then I double-clicked the desktop icon and set 'Mark as Trusted', after that the proper desktop icon appears,and can be double-clicked to launch the application.

I also have selinux set to permissive mode, a selinux error is generated, so it probably doesn't work with selinux in enforcing mode.

itsjustarumour · #15 15th July 2009, 02:01 AM

@Godel.

Thanks a lot for all your help, but alas still not working (I'm using KDE 4.3 RC1 on F11 32-bit btw)

I uninstalled Adobe AIR, and followed all your instructions. I seemed to have all the packages you mentioned already installed (or the KDE equivalents of them). I already had SELinux deactivated. Everything seemed to go fine - the BBC iPlayer Desktop and AIR installs seemed to go exactly as they should, I got the BBCi Player Desktop icon... but it just doesn't work.

I've tried installing iPlayer both as user and as root, but no dice. So I don't think this is a permissions issue. I guess that can only mean theres an unresolved dependency somewhere, but I'll be d*mned if I can work out what it is...

Right now I can't do any further investigating, as I can't load my Desktop - but thats a different problem! Fedora 11 is not going as well as I'd hoped, it seems...

Best Regards,

itsjustarumour