First of all, you should subscribe to the Freevo developer mailinglist to get useful information on the current status of Freevo..

Using the source tree

To test Freevo, use the directory you checked out in (see Subversion). Before you can start Freevo, you need to type install the Freevo and the Kaa repository. This will also download external dependencies like mbus and the notifier. As a new requirement (besides the Freevo 1.5 modules), you need Imlib2 and pysqlite. (RPMs for Imlib2 are now available from Fedora Extras (FC4) as well as from sault.org.) Note that you shall use sqlite 3.X and pysqlite 2.x.

Warning: some people have observed problems with Imlib2 1.2.0 (such as errors loading JPEGs). However Imlib2 1.2.1 appears to be stable.

# Install pysqlite2
wget http://initd.org/pub/software/pysqlite/releases/2.3/2.3.3/pysqlite-2.3.3.tar.gz
tar -zxvf pysqlite-2.3.3.tar.gz
cd pysqlite-2.3.3
python setup.py install
cd ..

# check-out Kaa from SVN:
svn co svn://svn.freevo.org/kaa/trunk kaa
# now compile everything in the source tree
cd kaa
python setup.py install
cd ..
# check-out Freevo from SVN:
svn co svn://svn.freevo.org/freevo/trunk freevo
# now compile everything in the source tree
cd freevo
python setup.py install

If you are planning on using VDR through Freevo you must install vdrpylib from CVS. Freevo uses this library as its interface to VDR.

Freevo 2.0 CVS has experimental support for DirectFB (NOT using pygame/SDL). To use this you must install pydirectfb from CVS.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@pydirectfb.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pydirectfb login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@pydirectfb.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pydirectfb co pydirectfb
cd pydirectfb
python setup.py install
cd ..

Gentoo users should use the ebuilds from the overlay. See InstallationGentoo.

Ubuntu dependencies: Installation/UbuntuFeistyDependencies

Installing Freevo to a different dir

You should test Freevo using the source tree first. The current cvs is not stable. The installation into the system is tricky right now. There are no ebuilds, RPMs, Debian packages or similar. 'python setup.py install' will install everything into your system dir, breaking older installations of Freevo. You can set a prefix for the installation to test it first.

python setup.py install --prefix=~/freevo