There's a difference between blunt and rude. Why would anyone even try to help you if this is what they can expect? If I were a professional tutor that you were paying to teach you "Linux for beginners" I could almost understand your response.

I will try to help you, but you're going to have to also help yourself. So, instruction 1:

Don't do anything you don't understand. If it's not clear what you're doing, either do a google search if you're impatient, or ask and wait until someone has time to answer.

In my first post I mistakenly assumed that everyone would follow this rule. My apologies again. My only defence is that my line of work is not teaching people the fundamentals of linux. I've edited now so hopefully it won't happen to anyone else.

As digbum says, you're nearly there. Type "Y" at that prompt and it should install iplayer-dl. As part of the installation, a link to the iplayer-dl executable is made in the /usr/bin/ directory.

This is a special directory, in that any executable inside it can be run from the command line from any location by typing its name. Therefore after this step you should be able to run iplayer-dl from the command line by simply typing:

If you do this it should spit out some usage instructions. Some people seem to be having problems at this stage, so if you also do, be patient while we try and work out the problem. It's difficult when things work perfectly well on your own device to troubleshoot a problem on other people's!

By default, if you type
On the command line it will download the show to your current location. Your N900's storage is split into a few pieces called partitions. It's not a good idea to fill any of these up! When you start a terminal, your starting location is in the "application storage" part, which is 2GB. Therefore if you open a terminal and just type iplayer-dl URL, it will put the show into your application storage and it will quickly fill up.

You can solve this by either navigating to the place you wish to store the file before running iplayer-dl (which would be a pain), or by use the optional "-d" flag. i.e. if you type:

it will save the video to /home/user/MyDocs/.videos, which is the best place for it. It would be a pain to type this out every time, so instead you can create an alias. In order to do this you need to put the following line into your /home/user/.profile file:

Since many people struggle with using terminal based text editors, an easy way of doing this is with the command I supplied earlier.

If you type:

on the command line all it will do is print "Big Phat Jan is great" on your screen. That is what the echo command does. If you add on a special redirection symbol, ">>" that means that the results of the command will instead be appended to the end a file that you specify after the symbol. So typing:

Is just the same as using a text editor to add the alias command to the file /home/user/.profile , but (I thought) a bit easier. This file is only read every time you start up a new terminal, hence the need to close and reopen the terminal before the new "iplayer" command will work. Alternatively, you could force your current terminal to read the file by typing:

Unfortunately it looks like you have done the echo command while still root (could be a problem with the instructions - I'll check after finishing this post), which means that "user" doesn't have the right to edit the file any more. This is bad! You can change the ownership using the following commands:

Whenever you've finished doing a command to be done as root you should type "exit" to return you to a normal non-root shell.

OK, that done, you can check the contents of this file using the "cat" command. All this command does is print the contents of a file. So typing:

Should print the contents to your screen. If you see the iplayer alias all is well. It's unclear from your message whether the alias has somehow split itself over two lines. If so, you will need to remove it and put it in again on one line. As you don't have any other aliases set up, the easiest way would be to do:

rm /home/user/.profile
echo 'alias iplayer="iplayer-dl -d /home/user/MyDocs/.videos"' >> /home/user/.profile

Making sure that the echo command is all on one line.

When you've done all of this, "iplayer URL" should work. Let me know if you have difficulting understanding or executing any of these commands.

Cheers,
Jan