Adam SMASH!

A while ago I promised a writeup on the installation of SABnzbd+ on Ubuntu. Well I finally got around to it now that I am more comfortable with the software. I MUCH prefer this program to HellaNZB. It is far, FAR superior in my opinion, probably due to the fact that it is still being actively developed. It has a web interface, and automated RSS downloading of NZBs, just to name two of the features.

So let’s get started. If you have Ubuntu 9.04 or later, you can install it from the package manager if you want, but that’s an older version (0.4.9) of the program, I’m all about the latest and greatest and using aptitude is cheating!

And this one is ridiculously easy to set up! It’s just a python script. So nothing to ./configure or make install etc. You basically untar it in a directory and run it from there.

First we need to prepare for the program. It has a couple of dependencies. These we will get from Aptitude. I know I said it was cheating, it’s ok in this case. We have a greater goal here.

So to obtain the program, you need to go to http://sabnzbd.org/download. The link we want is the one for the Python Sources. Save that file someplace where you know how to get to it. I am going to grab it with wget from the CLI, because I love the CLI.

Once you’ve got it saved, we need to extract it out of the gzipped tarball. I have a directory in my home directory called ~/bin which is in my path and in which I store alot of my downloaded programs, instead of losing everything in /usr/share or something like that. It’s just a personal preference.

So I downloaded the file to ~/bin, now to extract it:

This will extract the contents of the file to a directory titles SABnzbd-0.5.0. We need to CD into that.

You can really at this point just type ./SABnzbd.py and launch the program, and for the first run I would recommend it, since it will start a browser up and run you through a quick wizard to set up the program. So let’s do that.

You’ll see some information scroll past and eventually a browser window should open and you’ll be faced with the wizard to configure SABnzbd on your machine. Go ahead and step through this process to get it all configured with your usenet server’s info etc. Oh I highly recommend the Plush theme, I didn’t like it at first, but I am a convert now, and I love it. It wouldn’t be SABnzbd in my opinion without Plush.

During the setup a hidden directory will get created in your home folder called .sabnzbd. This is where your configuration file will be saved, and should be added to any backup system you are using so in case your drive craps out you still have your config for SABnzbd.

If we want to use that config every time SABnzbd starts, we need to tell it that at launch. We will also tell it to launch as a daemon, instead of needing to launch it from the CLI everytime we want to download something. This is the command to launch it using the config file we created in the setup wizard and to make it a daemon, making it run in the background:

Obviously you will need to change adam to whatever your username is. The -d is to make it a daemon, the -f is to tell it where to look for the configuration file. If you call SABnzbd with this command line, it will return you to the command line and look like it did nothing, but SABnzbd is running in the background. If you launch http://localhost:8080/sabnzbd in your browser, you’ll see it’s going!

Now just add the following line to your Ubuntu startup programs and you’ll have this start up everytime you log into Ubuntu:

Again you will need to change adam to whatever your username is, and if you decided to extract and run the program from somewhere other that a directory called bin in your home directory, then you’ll need to substitute that. I’ll write some more later on some of the configuration options that exist in the SABnzbd config menus. For now, this should have you ready to start downloading from usenet using SABnzbd. If you have any problems or questions about SABnzbd feel free to comment or contact me on the contact page and I will do my best to answer your questions.