I thought that I’d follow up on my complaint about the non-working PenguinTV on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. From a forum post, I found a workaround:
In a terminal, type
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefoxand thenexport MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefoxand then execute PenguinTV:PenguinTV &, which allows the program to find what its looking for.
That’s a bit arduous, so why not automate it? I did so, and it is really a hack, but I thought that I’d share it with you. Anyone who has created bash scripts before (or batch files in Windows/DOS) will find this to be quite trivial, but there are many out there who still haven’t “gotten their feet wet”.
So, the first thing that you’ll want to do is open your favorite editor. For quick and dirty scripts like this one, I use nano, as many systems have it included and the learning curve is quite small. So, for nano, you would open a terminal and type nano -w Pengi. I use Pengi as the name for my script. you can use whatever you want. The -w flag for nano causes it to continue beyond the border of your terminal when writing a line, keeping you from truncating a long command. Its not really necessary for this script because the commands are quite short, but its a good habit.
Here’s what you put in your editor:
#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox
PenguinTV
Save the file. Ensure that you’ve typed each command on a new line. Then change it to executable with a quick chmod: chmod a+rwx Pengi
You can now open PenguinTV on the command prompt by typing /home/your-username/Pengi
That’s not the end of it, though, right? You want your nice little icon to execute the file when you click it, I am sure. Whether I use Gnome, KDE, or XFCE, I’ve become accustomed to putting a quick launch for my favorite applications on the taskbar for easy access. This is the case for PenguinTV as well.
Its quite easy, in these desktop environments, to change the attributes of an application launcher. Its even a tad easier than when using Microsoft Windows, as you don’t have to remember to put quotes around the application path. So, you would right-click the PenguinTV icon and select “properties” from the menu. In the “path to executable”, you would replace “PenguinTV” with “/home/your-username/Pengi" (without the quotes, of course) and click OK. You should be in business and PenguinTV should open with the right environment variables to launch successfully.
