Addendum
Supplemental Software
To get the most out of your brand spankin’ new Sick Beard install you may want to check out some of the following applications. These are applications that are either designed for Sick Beard, or that just simply go hand in hand with the time saving features of Sick Beard (philosophical cousins if you will).
These applications are provided in no particular order, and I’m only including applications that I currently recommend using (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list!).
SABnzb+
If you haven’t come to this guide by way of my SABnzbd+ guide, be sure to check it out. For those that are not familiar, SABnzbd+ which, I read as “SAB-newzbin” (though “SAB-nzb-daemon plus” is probably much closer to correct!), is an Usenet client. It is highly automated, robust, and once set up can run and run with minimal user intervention.
XBMC Media Center
XBMC Media Center, also known simply as “X-B-M-C,” is a full featured, skin-able, and extensible, media front-end, library manager, and, who’d of thought, media player. It can play nearly any media you might throw at it. Video and music files, CD’s, DVD’s, Blu-rays, you name it! (Though anything with “DRM” requires some extra unnecessary work.)
With the right skin (Simplicity), XBMC Media Center provides a highly polished (second to none) front-end for any media playing computer along with oodles of art, posters, ratings, trailers, lyrics, plot summaries, TV guide like functionality, and so many more bits of supplemental information that I cannot feasibly cover them all here.
Couch Potato
Sick Beard isn’t likely to pick up movies anytime soon, and thankfully we have Couch Potato to fill a similar roll anyway! Couch Potato requires a little more hands on from the user currently, but it is working towards the automation and management features that Sick Beard already has in place.
And this is not to say Couch Potato is simply playing catch up to Sick Beard, it has many nice features that I haven’t seen elsewhere! I will be writing a full Install, Setup, & Configuration guide once the Management features mature.
Trouble-shooting
Remember, you’ve installed a daily build which only receives minimal testing. It is possible that there are bugs!
If you have problems or questions feel free to comment below. If I have time and am able I will try to help you out (especially with the install, setup, & configuration).
Do NOT run the script as a super user! This will pretty much hose your install. This should be ran as a standard user. No super powers are needed here (in other words no sudo!)
If you continue to have problems you will best served by visiting SickBeard.com and going to their forum. Be sure to read the forum rules before posting, and post logs and as many details as you can!
If you do not have SABnzbd+ installed, you will likely have to install the Cheetah packages for Python!
Revision History
- 4/6/2010 – Initial revision for the newly updated guide!
i get /etc/init.d/sickbeard: permission denied
Her Erik,
I need some more details there. You just trying to start Sick Beard or adding the startup entries? What command (exactly) did you run? Are you running Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Other and what version?
Best of luck!
will you please create a PPA for SB?
Howdy Sick Beard enthusiast,
That’s definitely something I may do in the future. Currently however I don’t have the time to commit to something like that and I don’t want to do it unless I can maintain it well enough to keep it regularly updated.
Downloading Sick Beard is pretty straight forward and it includes its own updater so there’s not a big pull to setup a Private Package Archive (PPA) currently.
Cheers and thanks for the request!
Hi,
I am having difficulty with the script. It executes without problems from the terminal but does not start when I reboot.
I am on Ubuntu 11.04.
Hi DubDubZA,
Have you ever ran Sick Beard or the script using sudo? Without additional information I’m guessing that might be the cause of the problem. If you have you’ll need to delete the .sickbeard folder and re-install as the permissions will be messed up for Sick Beard and anything it touches from here on out.
It is possible to reset the permissions if you feel like doing some Google’ing and don’t mind a bit more of a learning curve.
Feel free to let me know how it goes, or if you have any other questions or details.
Best of luck!
I’m having the same problem. I did what you recommended and deleted my ~/.sickbeard directory and started over (hey, it’s quick to do anyway). The service starts and stops just great with a manual invoke of the “/etc/init.d/sickbeard start”, however it does not start on system start. Any ideas?
Hi, I have the same problem. I’ve definitely not run the script using sudo. It works manually, but not on startup.
Ubuntu 11.10
Hi,
This is a very nice guide. I am a noob to Ubuntu and all the good stuff shown here so I don’t know if what I am about to say is really relative or not.
I followed your guide to the letter and did exactly as instructed. Everything worked as described until I got to the point just above where I had to put the autoProcesTV directory in the PostProcessing field in Sab. I put this in and kept on getting an error about not been able to create a script. Adding to that I also could not select the script in Sab-> Categories.
I even made a seperate directory and copied the py scripts into that and tried again. At the end of the day I ran the following command to get it to work:
sudo chmod 777 /home/dracosveen/.sickbeard/autoProcessTV
which then gave the permissions needed and then everything started working as described in your guide.
Been new I have no idea why I had to set the permissions.
Hey Dracoseven,
You may have ran sickbeard with sudo at some point. I’d recommend checking the permissions and ownership of the entire .sickbeard folder and everything in it. It’s likely going to cause you additional problems down the line.
Best of luck!
Hey, thanks for posting this guide. It has been very helpful in setting up this environment.
I’m looking forward to your guide to install Couch Potato. Hopefully it will be posted soon since I need some guidelines to get it installed.
Thanks again!
Hey Linux n00b,
Just for you, I’ll get the Couch Potato guide out by Monday or Tuesday evening. I’ll shoot you an email when it’s done.
Cheers, and thanks for the kind words!
Thanks, looking forward to it!
Still hoping this will be posted soon.
Hey Linux n00b & Powderking!
Apologies for the delay and confusion. I’m currently working on the Couch Potato guide. My guides take about 16 hours from start to finish once I finally get sat down and start writing (not counting the initial research or learning the program or anything of the like) and I needed to get my SABnzbd+ guide updated prior to releasing Couch Potato. Thanks for your patience and interest, it should be out VERY shortly.
In the meantime if you guys are stuck in a certain spot feel free to shoot me an email via my contact page and I’ll see if I have an answer for you.
Cheers!
Hi
Is your guide to Couch Potato already available?
I couldn’t find it. But maybe I’m just a little blind ;-)
I do have some problems too and your SABnzbd+ and Sick Beard were great help! So I hope I can solve my problems with Couch Potato too :-)
Cheers
Hey daemox
First off, your site is pure gold – Not just the guides you write, but also that you find just the software (HeadPhones & Couchpotato) which I need :)
With that said, I have a rather annoying bug with SickBeard..
Whenever a download has finished, it isn’t post-processed..
The script log from Sab gives the error: 401 Unauthorized
I don’t know if it’s significant, that download and “TV Archive” are on separate HDD’s..
I hope you can help :)
Hey The_Eggert,
Thank you kindly for the compliments!
The two different drives shouldn’t be an issue unless there’s a permission issue going on (such as if you ever ran Sick Beard as root or with sudo, or don’t presently have ownership of the archival disk). Other than that, if Sick Beard is otherwise communicating with SABnzbd+ just fine, I wouldn’t think it’d be a API Key or user/password issue between Sick Beard and SABnzbd+ so hard to guess at other possibilities currently.
You may want to just hop on the Sick Beard IRC channel, or hit up their forum and post your log as they see more problems than I do on a regular basis. Also if you want to send me the full log I can take a look (dae...@gmail.com). Both Sick Beard’s and SABnzbd+’s log may be helpful in this case and you may also want to take a look at the permissions and ownership of the script itself as well as any files it tried to post-process recently but failed.
Best of luck, and when you get this figured let me know how it goes!
I tried removing all passwords and user names, which fixed it, so I must have just written the wrong thing somewhere – Thanks for your help :)