Such a problem can have multiple reasons. As its not clear what exactly the problem is in your case, I will describe solutions for the most common issues below.

1. Previous installation was somehow interrupted and files are corrupt

At first I would recommend to remove the whole wine prefix. This ensures that no corrupted files are left, which could prevent a proper installation.
First close all browser windows, then run (as a regular user, not root):

rm -rf ~/.wine-pipelight

The folder will be recreated automatically and contains only Pipelight specific data, so don't worry about any lost data.
Afterwards start the browser window again, open about:plugins, and check if it works then.

2. Outdated version of Pipelight or Wine-compholio

If it still doesn't work you should make sure that your version of pipelight and wine-compholio is up to date. You can use

 dpkg --list | grep "(pipelight|wine-compholio)"

to check that. Currently (at the time of writing) you should have wine-compholio >= 1.7.12 and pipelight >= 0.2.4.2.

3. Unusual file system

Wine only works properly when you run it from a "usual" file systems - I have already seen installations, where users were trying to run wine from an NTFS drive mounted via FUSE, or other unusual network drive configurations, where Silverlight cannot be installed properly.

The easiest way to find out the used file system is by manually taking a look at:

/etc/fstab

If the file system is either a network drive or some other unusual file system mounted via FUSE, then this is most likely the problem. If it is not possible to switch to different file system you can alternatively modify the Pipelight config files, such that the wineprefix is located on a different harddrive. Example instructions how to setup something like this:

cp /usr/share/pipelight/configs/pipelight-silverlight5.1 ~/.config



# Open the new config file in an editor, for example gedit

gedit ~/.config/pipelight-silverlight5.1



# search for "winePrefix = $HOME/.wine-pipelight/"

# modify it for example to "winePrefix = /media/secondhdd/.wine-pipelight/"

Unrelated, but also very important: To watch DRM protected content, the file system where the wine prefix is located also has to support XATTR (extended attributes), otherwise you'll get error N8156-6205! You can ignore this if you don't want to use Pipelight to watch DRM protected content.

The following commandline illustrates how to check for extended attributes in the home directory (the default location of the wine prefix):

# Run this once, such that setfattr and getfattr is installed

sudo apt-get install attr



# XATTR check, from: http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Netflix/Pipelight

touch ~/.xattr_test && setfattr -n 'user.testAttr' -v 'attribute value' ~/.xattr_test &> /dev/null; getfattr ~/.xattr_test 2>&1 | grep -q user.testAttr && echo 'It works!' || echo 'No workie!'; rm ~/.xattr_test &> /dev/null

If the result is "No workie!" (and the attr package is installed) then you are missing XATTR in the home directory. Here is an example of how it can be enabled for ext4.

4. If it still doesn't work ...

To get rid of the annoying dialogs the easiest way is either to uninstall pipelight, or at least to disable the problematic plugins:

sudo pipelight-plugin --disable silverlight



# if multiple plugins have problems:

# sudo pipelight-plugin --disable-all

Nevertheless this doesn't really solve the problem, but just hides the error. If you want to use Pipelight and need additional support, the fasted way is to ask someone in #pipelight on IRC freenode (be a bit patient if noone responds immediately), or alternatively post a more detailed error description on launchpad and we'll help you to track it down.