Media-build is just a script that will get the most up-to-date dvb drivers and include them in OpenElec. I don’t think it’s required if your DVB tuner is supported for a longtime by Linux, but let’s include it anyway.

The easy way

As I’m really kind, I built OpenELEC.tv, media-build, and tvheadend for you. Just download these files and go to the “Create SD-card” step.

• OpenELEC (commit 1355da624e) + media-build (commit 425bf0084e)
• tvheadend

The hard way – let’s build this

Create the SD-card

If you’re not coming from the build section, just download OpenElec from the top of this post, and put it in a folder. Then, open a terminal and go to this folder.

Insert your SD card, and extract the archive:

Then, it depends of what you platform is.

Linux

I’m assuming that /dev/sdb is your SDCard device:

OSX

I made a pending Pull Request on Github to handle OSX SDCard installation. As it’s not yet merged to the official OpenELEC repo, you’ll have to go here and save it to ./create_sdcard.

Then, assuming that your SDCard is /dev/disk3:

Tvheadend

Boot your RPi, you should get a beautiful XBMC interface. From your regular computer you should see an openelec shared network folder. Extract the tvheadend archive somewhere on your computer, and move the resulting folder to openelec/downloads/.

On XBMC, go to System -> Settings -> Add-ons -> Install from zip file. Then, select thz tvheadend zip file from Home/downloads/service.multimedia.hts-tvheadend/. You should get an installation confirmation message. Reboot your RPi.

When your RPi is fully started up, navigate to the following link from your computer’s browser:

Then, navigate to Configuration -> TV Adapters and select your adapter in the list. You can now configure your tuner… and watch TV !

• xhtml2pdf: the worst. It has a very bad CSS interpreter and it is pretty impossible to make a clean PDF out from a complex html page.
• WeasyPrint: that’s better. It has its own HTML and CSS2 interpreters, and despite some minor issues it is fairly reliable. However it requires some big dependencies, and I eventually had some memory issues on my webserver.
• wkhtmltopdf with its Django wrapper: for now, the best. It makes use of Webkit to render HTML+CSS+JS(!) pages, I don’t think you can do better. However, it requires QT, and this is big. Well, not the “classical” QT, a patched QT (that’s even worse) that allows to run without an X server. This is what I’m using for now in my projects

We’ll see here how to build wkhtmltopdf and a basic django-wkhtmltopdf usage. These steps has been tested on a Webfaction server (CentOS 6) through SSH.

The easy way

Enter this command and go to the “Post-install” chapter.

It will install wkhtmltopdf in ~/bin with its static libraries.

The hard way – Let’s build this

This is mostly taken from the wkhtmltopdf Wiki, but with some no-shared-libraries webserver specifics. Log on SSH, and let the magic begin.

Create a ~/download folder

Get wkhtmltopdf-qt:

Configure, and build it! It will take some time (about an hour, which is not much as we disabled a lot of features):

Then, download wkhtmltopdf, and build it:

You now have wkhtmltopdf and its static dependencies in ./bin/. Let’s copy them into ~/bin:

Post-installation

We need ~/bin in our $PATH. That’s where django-wkhtmltopdf will look for. Add the following line in your ~/.bashrc.

And source it:

We’re done with wkhtmltopdf, let’s install its Django wrapper.

django-wkhtmltopdf

Go to your django app, and install django-wkhtmltopdf with PIP:

Then, in your view:

Be careful, this last line of code is not documented in the django-wkhtmltopdf’s wiki. It may be subject to changes in future releases. However, that’s the only way I found to get a binary-string instead of a HttpResponse.

That’s all, folks !

However, it has a lot of dependencies and it just can’t fit in a simple python virtual environment. It took me a whole day to install on Webfaction, so I think it would be helpful to show how to do it properly.

These steps has been tested on a Webfaction CentOS 6 server (python2.7), and they should be the same for others Linux systems. If your system is not exactly the same, you might have to install other dependencies manually. Linux From Scratch is your helpful friend in this kind of situation.

Log to ssh, and let the magic begin.

Dependencies

WeasyPrint relies on the following dependencies:

• Pango >= 1.29.3 (with introspection)
• pycairo
• GdkPixbuf >= 2.25 (with introspection, required for images other than PNG)
• PyGObject 3.x

Of course, these dependencies have their own dependencies. It becomes really hard to install all of them by hand, so I made a small shell script to do it automatically. It will install all of them in your home directory (with --prefix=$HOME).

Then, add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc:

And source it:

Virtual environment

As we will install global python libraries, we need a virtual environment that is aware of system packages. If you didn’t create one yet:

If your virtual env is already created:

WeasyPrint

Here we are. Install WeasyPrint using the following lines:

Finally, test it:

If there is an import error, please check that you correctly sourced your ~/.bashrc.

Thanks to Ilias Romanos from the Webfaction Q/A forum for the pyCairo part ! Don’t hesitate to improve the install script on github:gist.