[arm-allstar] Newby instructions for playnews

[Stanley Stanukinos]

Thanks to Doug for his wonderful work on the playnews script and help from others I was able to get it operational on my node.
I am going to list the steps in order I used so someone can follow that has linited Linux experience and make it work.

1. mkdir /etc/asterisk/local/playnews
This creates the directory where you will have the playnews files.
2. cd /etc/asterisk/local/playnews
you are moving to the directory location to get ready to download the files.
3. wget http://hamvoip.org/downloads/playnews-0.6.tar.gz
This transfers the file to your playnews directory
4. sudo gunzip playnews0.6.tar.gz
This unzips the playnews tar file
5. sudo tar xf playnews-0.6.tar
This restores the files to the directory from the tarball
6. mv playnews-0.6 playnews
This renames the playnews to remove the -0.6
7. rm playnews-0.6.tar
This removes the playnews tar file to free up disk space.

If Doug puts out an update you can follow this process and just use the new file name. If you down load the same file again it will ask if you want to over write the existing file and in my case it was yes.

to run the script now on the local node, I did the following.

./playnews ARRL NOW XXXXX L
XXXXX is your node number, this will play the ARRL news.

./playnews ARN NOW XXXXX L
XXXXXX is your node number, this will play the ARN news.

I have not played with the CRON jobs to set that up but with Doug's instructions it should work.

The only issue I had was trying to have the playnews run from the /etc/asterisk/local/playnews directory I had to use the format shwn in my examples. It would not run with just playnews ARRL NOW XXXXX L.
Perhaps one of the wiser Linux guru's can put it in simpler terms for this newby.

Stan

KA5IID