Solved: Miro won’t start - missing video directory
A couple of days ago a brand new version of Miro the open video podcatcher was released. I was eager to try it out. It is supposed to be faster than the previous release. I had to wait a few days for a rpm for my linux distribution to be released. Thanks to the great work of the PackMan crew this happended pretty soon after the release. Bummer! Miro won’t start. It seems I cleaned up to good after uninstalling the previous release. Miro complained that the video directory is missing. I checked the Miro Forums but could not find anything related to Linux. There were some tips for Mac OS X but nothing for linux. I checked the source, followed strace, used Google Linux but nothing turned up. I thought the fix would be as easy as finding what directory Miro is looking for. Finding the directory was not easy. I was close to giving up before I tried the unittest switch for Miro.
# miro –unittest
What shall I say? That did the trick! The unittest failed but it created the missing directory (structure):
# ~/Movies/Democracy/Incomplete Downloads/
Now Miro starts. It still looks like it is not running properly but it is a start.
PS: I use OpenSuSE 10.3 and KDE3.
How to add a custom user-agent string to Konqueror
You can easily set a custom user-agent string for a specific site through a predefined list of user-agent strings. If you want to define your own custom user-agent string I did not find a gui for that. The solution I found is the following. Launch your favorite text editor and open the file
~/.kde/config/kio_httprc
Just add two lines to the file. Here is an example. I wanted Konqueror to identify as an iPhone for m.podcast.de. The original iPhone has the following user-agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
So I added the following two lines to the file
[m.podcast.de]
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
That’s all. Save the file. Relaunch Konqueror and you are done!