More Adventures with Linux and TED (AKA TED with Tux)

As part of my mission to turn my server into "better than a DVR", I need to find a way to automatically download content. The best way I have seen so far is TED ( Torrent Episode Downloder). TED preforms a fairly simple function, it searches for new episodes of shows you are looking for and downloads them automatically. The good news here is that it saves me from having to crawl through the sites I know and use to find episodes of what I want to watch. The bad news is that my computer will be automatically downloading content, which aside from potentially filling my hard drive in a hurry could cause other problems that I need to keep an eye on.

We are going to install from the terminal, although most of this can be done in the GUI I prefer to use the command line.

T.E.D. requires Java run time environment installed, not just the plugin. With the Terminal open type the following command.

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin

then download the latest version here

from the command line we need to create a home for the files before extracting TED

mkdir TED
unzip tedv0972.zip -d ted

Next we need to make an application launcher, to start that we create a text document named 'ted' that contains this.

#!/bin/bash
java -jar /home/user/TED/ted.jar noTray

This will launch the application, I could not get it to work as a tray app.

 Make sure the path matches where ever you extracted ted too. the next step is to make sure that the file can be run as an application

chmod +x TED

and the last step from the command line is to move ted into a folder included in the search path. it should look something like this:

sudo mv TED /usr/bin

and that's it, all that has to happen from there is start ted and add shows to the list, simple as that.

Everything I've done from the command line can be done from the GUI but I like the command line. the best instructions I've found have been here. I do want to thank the author of that post for putting things up in a way that was easy to follow, saved me a lot of work.

So that's Step 3 of 4 on my way to better than a DVR, the next step is to get streaming set up between the computer and the Xbox.