Topics

1

Installation issues / Fiire experience

« on: June 29, 2008, 08:14:58 pm »

In a number of posts on this forum, it is suggested that a way to avoid some of the hardware and setup issues with linuxmce is to buy the system ready-installed on Fiire's Engines and Stations. Some people had reported that the hardware compatibility of Fiire's kit was less than ideal, but many people seemed to think it was better than doing it yourself (I suspect based more on bitter experience of DIY and hope that there was a better alternative, than on any direct experience with Fiire).

I just wanted a functioning linuxmce system, and was prepared to pay the extra to have it pre-configured for me by Fiire rather than struggle with trying to get it going on my own hardware. So I bought a FiireEngine and two FiireStations (one 1" VESA-mount system, one set-top box) to see if it really made things easier.

My experience to date has been less than satisfactory. I have given them another 48 hours to get it working. I will report my experience and conclusions, including whether they finally got it working or how they behaved if they didn't get it working, to this forum later in the week. Based on my experience so far, I'd say you'd have to be mad to waste money (and, I suspect, more time than if I'd tried to put it together myself) on their kit, but perhaps they will rescue things at the last minute.

2

Installation issues / Problems upgrading from 0704 to 0710 on FiireEngine

« on: June 21, 2008, 10:45:57 pm »

Had a "sort of" working install of 0704 on my FiireEngine ("sort of" in that the FE itself was working fairly well, but there were problems with the two FiireStations running off it). Received my copy of the 0710 install DVD in the post, so decided to upgrade to see if that solved the problems with the FiireStations.  Tried using the gutsy-upgrade-scripts, as per the wiki, and selecting to install from DVD. It copied all the packages from the DVD fine, but the script barfed at some point (I think on exit), apparently because I had installed a few non-core packages (e.g. emacs, which is the editor I am comfortable with). Still, it wasn't obvious what I should do, or that the failure to upgrade these packages was very serious, so I tried rebooting, as there were no further instructions. Now I have a dead FiireEngine.

If I select one of the recovery options from the grub menu (so I can see what is happening during boot-up), it gets as far as loading the forcedeth driver, and then freezes, eventually returning:

ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/bf742ddb-[etc] does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

I have rebooted and changed the pointer to the root filesystem in one of the recovery options in grub, from root=uuid=bf742... to root=/dev/hda1, which is where I think the root filesystem is located by default on the FiireEngine. It still isn't happy (wanting to drop me to a console for repairs), but if I press Ctrl-D to carry on with the booting process regardless, it seems to mount the root filesystem and fires up the various processes. It seems to hang at the end, but that's simply because it hasn't fired up a GUI, nor switched me to one of the consoles. I can Alt-F1 to get an option to login. I had setup a password for root, so I can get in and edit stuff, so this has allowed me to find out what the UUID for the root device is and to edit grub accordingly. I also uninstalled the offending packages (emacs21, eieio, ede, semantic, jde).

Now I can reboot again, at the end of which it appears to successfully complete the installation process. But still I don't have the GUI - I am left at the console. I am not clear what I now need to do to get it to fire up the linuxmce GUI.

I've tried starting X as root, and then selecting Linux Media Center from the start menu. It's been ticking over for half an hour now. Don't know if it's just a question of patience, and whether it will start of its own accord as the linuxmce user next time I boot up. Any suggestions?

3

Users / Unmet dependencies installing slimserver

« on: June 01, 2008, 01:51:02 pm »

I tried to install slimserver on my linuxmce server, but wasn't allowed to because of unmet dependencies for libnet-dns-perl, which required the security-updated version of perl (5.8.8-7ubuntu0.1) for feisty, rather than the release version (5.8.8-7build1). I had only the default repositories enabled in apt's sources.list (i.e. local deb-cache, feisty's release, security and updates, and linuxmce's repositories, neither of which seems to be available).

The only way I could get it to install the security updates for ubuntu was to comment out the local deb-cache folder in apt's sources.list. An apt-get update and upgrade then installed a whole host of updates (security and other) including the necessary version of perl. I could then install slimserver. Re-enabling the deb-cache repository then allowed me to install the slimserver-plugin for linuxmce and seemed also to downgrade slimserver from 6.3 to 6.2.2.

Is it safe to install the ubuntu updates like I have done, or will this break linuxmce? If the latter, how does one ensure that the linuxmce server is secure, and reconcile dependencies like this?