I see an error message "XMLTV requires a Date::Manip timezone of +0000 to work properly." - how can I fix it?

This problem is being tracked in Ubuntu Bug 544522. It occurs in Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid) when trying to download UK listings.

Note: it is also occurring on Mandriva. See the bottom of this page for instructions on how to fix it there.

FreeGuide relies on XMLTV to download its listings, and XMLTV relies on a library called Date::Manip. Date::Manip was recently changed, and those changes appear in Ubuntu 10.04. Unfortunately, the version of XMLTV included with Ubuntu 10.04 does not work properly with the changed Date::Manip.

There are 3 possible solutions to this problem.

Wait for Ubuntu release in backports or updates

Hopefully, soon, the fixed version of XMLTV will be placed in the "Backports" section of the Lucid repositories. You can enable this section in the Software Sources tool on Ubuntu.

It might even be placed into the updates section, which should mean you don't need to change anything to upgrade to it. This looks unlikely, though.

Get it from Debian unstable

A version of XMLTV that contains the fix may be downloaded from the Debian archives. You should download these packages (.deb files): xmltv-util, xmltv and xmltv-gui (you may also need libxmltv-perl and/or libparse-recdescent-perl). You can install them by opening a terminal, cd-ing into the directory that contains the .deb files you downloaded, and typing:

sudo dpkg -i *xmltv*.deb

Build from source

Another approach is to run:

sudo apt-get build-dep xmltv-gui

and then download the XMLTV source and build it with:

perl Makefile.PL && make && sudo make install

This worked for me, but is not recommended.

Mandriva fix

Thanks to Len Lawrence for his description of how he fixed this problem on Mandriva:

 This is a summary of the actions I took to resolve the timezone problem 
 for Mandriva 2010.1.  Ubuntu and Debian users seem to have the matter in 
 hand already.  Not sure about SuSE.

 For the record:

 As root:
 urpme xmltv
 urpme xmltv-grabbers-uk-0.5.56-4mdv2010.1.noarch

 As user:
 wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/49048115/xmltv_0.5.57-3_all.deb
 wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/49048118/xmltv-gui_0.5.57-3_all.deb
 wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/49048117/xmltv-util_0.5.57-3_all.deb
 wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/49048116/libxmltv-perl_0.5.57-3_all.deb

 As user:
 alien --to-rpm *.deb

 As root:
 urpmi *.rpm

 Terminal messages:
 Unknown option: x
 To satisfy dependencies, the following packages are going to be installed:
     Package                        Version      Release       Arch
 (medium "Contrib media")
    perl-WWW-Mechanize             1.620.0      1mdv2010.1    noarch
 (medium "Main")
    perl-Parse-RecDescent          1.965.1      1mdv2010.1    noarch
 (medium "Contrib")
    perl-DateTime                  0.550.0      1mdv2010.1    x86_64
 (medium "Contrib2")
    perl-DateTime-Format-Strptime  1.200.0      1mdv2010.1    noarch
 (command line)
    libxmltv-perl                  0.5.57       4             noarch
    xmltv                          0.5.57       4             noarch
    xmltv-gui                      0.5.57       4             noarch
    xmltv-util                     0.5.57       4             noarch
 3.5MB of additional disk space will be used.
 1.7MB of packages will be retrieved.

 Could not find xmltv-grabbers-uk.0.5.57... in source or rpm form but
 Freeguide managed to download listings all the same.