How to Build FreeGuide on Mac OS X

Based on an email from David Liontooth.

I've now successfully installed Freeguide on OSX, taking these steps (please improve):

GCC

Since we have to build several programs from source, we need a compiler. On OSX, the development environment is called xcode and can be downloaded from http://developer.apple.com/tools/download/ -- I had to sign up for a free account first. To install the dmg remotely (see detailed instructions at http://www.hmug.org/HowTos/RemoteInstall.html), issue

    hdiutil mount xcode_2.4.1_8m1910_6936315.dmg
    cd /Volumes/Xcode\ Tools
    sudo installer -verbose -pkg XcodeTools.mpkg -target /
    cd
    hdiutil unmount /Volumes/X*

You now have a build environment with gcc (3.3 and 4.0 in my case).

Perl

We need the latest stable version, currently 5.8.8 (cf. http://www.perl.com/download.csp):

    mkdir -p ~/src/perl
    cd ~/src/perl
    wget http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/stable.tar.gz
    tar zxvf stable.tar.gz
    cd perl-5.8.8
    ./configure

This is a lengthy process -- select defaults where possible, and say yes to "Use the PerlIO abstraction layer." I also said yes to threading, but this may not be advisable. I accepted the default prefix, /usr/local. Once configured,

    make
    make test

If it checks out -- I got a syslog error, likely because OSX uses /var/log/system.log, which I ignored -- you may want to switch to root user before you install:

    sudo bash
    make install

Incidentally, one problem with installing stuff remotely on OSX is that the system keeps going to sleep on you; I use the wakeonlan program in Linux to keep it awake.

Next, if you're using the bash shell, edit /etc/profile and add /usr/local/bin to the PATH before /usr/bin. Issue

    source /etc/profile

or, if you're on the OSX machine, exit your user and log back in. Verify that your default perl is your freshly compiled one:

    which perl

should give you "/usr/local/bin/perl" and not "/usr/bin/perl".

XMLTV prereqs

Get the latest xmltv-prereqs and xmltv from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=39046

Two of the prereqs were too old, so I also got these:

    wget
    http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/B/BY/BYRNE/SOAP-Lite-0.69.tar.gz
    wget
    http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/J/JO/JOSEPHW/XML-Writer-0.602.tar.gz

In addition, you may need the expat library from http://expat.sourceforge.net

Start with the xmltv-prereqs -- untar the package and enter each subdirectory:

    00_Class-MethodMaker-2.02
    00_HTML-Tagset-3.03
    00_TermReadKey-2.21
    00_Tk-804.027
    00_URI-1.30
    00_XML-LibXML-Common-0.13
    00_XML-NamespaceSupport-1.08
    00_XML-Parser-2.34
    01_HTML-Parser-3.36
    01_XML-SAX-0.12
    01_libwww-perl-5.79
    Compress-Zlib-1.33
    DateManip-5.42a
    HTML-TableExtract-1.08
    HTML-Tree-3.18
    Lingua-EN-Numbers-Ordinate-0.01
    Lingua-Preferred-0.2.4
    PerlIO-gzip-0.15
    Term-ProgressBar-2.06
    Text-Kakasi-2.04
    Tk-TableMatrix-1.1
    Unicode-String-2.07
    WWW-Mechanize-1.02
    XML-LibXML-1.58.patched
    XML-Twig-3.15

In each of these directories (see the README for those you can skip), issue

    perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/usr/local
    make
    make test
    make install

In the case of 00_Tk-804.027 and Tk-TableMatrix-1.1, you need the X11 SDK -- and the tests will only pass if you run them within X11. Unless you plan to run Freeguide within X11, these serve no purpose and you can live without them.

Do the same in the case of the separately downloaded packages:

    SOAP-Lite-0.69
    XML-Writer-0.602
    xmltv-0.5.45

You should now have a working XMLTV installation.

Freeguide configured according to Andy Balaam

Get the latest dmg of Freeguide from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=35309 install it.

Before starting Freeguide, configure it as your regular user as follows (the example is for North America):

    mkdir -p ~/.freeguide/xmltv-configs

And then (as one line):

    tv_grab_na_dd --config-file ~/.freeguide/xmltv-configs/na_dd.conf
    --configure

This will ask you to log in to zap-it and chose your lineup.

Now start FreeGuide and go to Tools, Options, Advanced, Grabbers, XMLTV, and modify the command lines shown for the na_dd grabber. The bottom one relates to the step you've just done manually, so you may as well make that one blank, but the top one should read:

/INSTALLATION_DIR/tv_grab_na_dd --quiet --config-file YOUR_HOME_DIR/.freeguide/xmltv-configs/na_dd.conf

for instance "/usr/local/bin/tv_grab_na_dd --quiet --config-file /Users/tna/.freeguide/xmltv-configs/na_dd.conf".

Click OK -- this is the end of the configuration.

Click on the "Download Listings" and watch the listings file into position.

The program runs great, but the installation is lengthy and it would be a great benefit to have packaged binaries.