Gerall’s Blog

I recently replaced the OS on my machine at home with Xubuntu, and wanted to use Lifrea to do some podcatching. I found that getting Firefox to use Liferea was not as straightforward as I thought, but with some help from #xubuntu on irc.freenode.net, I sorted out the final solution. Read on if you’re having trouble making Liferea and Firefox play nice as well…

This is how I got it working, in the order that yields fewest steps. (I went through many, many iterations before finding the missing part of the puzzle!)

1. sudo apt-get install lifrea
2. run liferea and configure it the way you want. I had mine download enclosures to my temporary directory, then minimized it to the notification area.
3. while liferea is running, confirm the program works by using the command line to add a feed. Like so:

   liferea-add-feed "http://your.feed.here/feed.xml"

4. you should see the appropriate RSS feed show up in Liferea
5. sudo apt-get install firefox-gnome-support
6. open firefox and go to Edit -> Preferences -> Feeds
7. click “Subscribe to feeds using:”
8. click the “Choose Application” button
9. type ‘/usr/bin/liferea-add-feed‘ and save

Now, you should be able to navigate to your favorite sites and click their RSS icon (or equivalent) to subscribe in Liferea. I’ll post some snapshots when I get home again. It shouldn’t be too tough getting this to work. My initial problem was caused with the ‘firefox-gnome-support’ package not being installed…

Tags: How To, Technical //