Can someone please do a review to compare/contrast Gryo, Wiimote and Fiire? I am really keen to get someone's opinion of each on how well they work etc. I would like just to pick one and buy it rather than go through the process that so many others seem to have, of buy 2 or 3 different remotes before finding the one they prefer - is there any consensus on which provides the best control, functions, and most especially which does the "best" motion sensing. The last in particular, how responsive are they to motion detection? Do they "sample" slowly or do they respond nice and quickly to motion?

Also, you say that the Fiire has specific firmware to support the Follow Me function, won't anything that uses Bluetooth do this anyway through the LMCE software because they connect to the closest BT dongle and LMCE does the rest? Is there something I am missing here?

Well we have Gyration Mice and we have the Fiire remote... don't have a Wii controller. The Gyration mouse works fine but has too few buttons to make totally usable standalone... ie you still need to use a keyboard to access much of UI2 (UI1 though would be ok). The Fiire remote has been designed specifically to work with UI2 so all of its buttons and features are tightly coupled and work very smoothly. Also it really is 'plug n play' straight out of the box I can confirm... no problems at all and very slick. Then there is follow-me. Now follow me has been part of Pluto (lmce ancestor) since the earliest days and yes it should work with BlueTooth dongles and the PDA or Symbian Orbiter. However in reality due to all BlueTooth dongles we have ever tested over performing in terms of the range there radio enerygy output delivers it is practically useless in any kind of normal sized house. The Orbiter in the PDA/Mobile Phone just cannot figure out which room its in and therefore follow-me can't work!

Hopwever with the Fiire remote follow-me for the first time just works as it should - press the follow-me button on the remote while watching a movie in the 'lounge' and walk to the 'Kitchen' and press follow-me again... and magically that same movie appears at the same time-code on the Orbiter in front of you. That blows people away when you show it too them I can tell you :-)

So from all perspectives I would say your best bet is the Fiire remote (the only negative is its brown plastic case!)

Are you sure?  I got this from the Video page on the wiki:

Zwave is a problem right now because the Zwave USB adapters shown in the video are not in production anymore. There is a new model from Intermatic, but there are no Linux drivers for the USB-to-RS232 chip on it. I heard that someone has sponsored the driver development so hopefully it will be added shortly.

It wasn't working with Pluto, and it doesn't seem like LMCE support has been added quite yet.  Fiire mentions a driver on their product page here:
http://shop.polywell.com/fiire/product_info.php?products_id=77
but they don't have a link to it.

I don't know if this an LMCE driver or what.  I guess I should just call, but I wanted to see if anyone else knew first.

Well no I am not 100% sure.... I also was partly guided, possibly incorrectly, by the fact that if you go to the Fiire side of the Polywell site and click on zwave in the side bar it takes you to a page about various Intermatic zwave products including the HA-22!

I will do some research on Monday and get a definitive answer and post that here then.

Is anyone looking at how content stored on external devices like memory card, Digital Cameras and other external storage is imported into the lmce system?

At present if I insert a memory card from a camera into a connected card reader lmce treats it as an external usb 'drive' - there is no option to copy this content onto the Core or other managed storage on the lmce managed LAN for permanent storage. My thinking is that the scripts that auto detect usb storage devices need to be extended to allow the user to have the option to copy the content from the external device to storage managed by the lmce core.

Anyone else looking at this or have some ideas as to how this should work?

What actually is the point of the Manage Drives dialogue??! I, too, have several drives there that once detected they never go away, and clicking the Manage button just brings up a screen with blank panels in it and some buttons that pretty much do nothing. What is this dialogue for?

Hi, I think this is one of those areas which got started and never completed. Pluto has many of those too. In many ways it would be better if these were not visible in the UI until they worked... but on the other hand it would  make those parts of the system more difficult for anyone wanting to modify or improve them.

Previously, I had a Pluto system running pretty much trouble free.
after the release of the latest LMCE, I thought i'd give it another try.

I set up the core and got all my lighting set up and have been using it that way for a couple weeks.

Now when PXE boot Dell 8200 (which worked flawlessly with pluto) it goes through the boot, sets itself up (packages etc) then it appears that the screen shuts down. I get no response from it at all unless I hit the power button which brings the screen back briefly and turns the system off.

The last lines that I can see say something about starting helper script and ending helper script. it's right after the ending helper script message that this is happening.

I have never seen this happen before.
Any suggestions about how to sort this out?

thanks
Ed

Sounds like the AVwizard cant run because X has not started properly. What your video hardware?

Success...I went with option two and it works like a charm.  I think where I went wrong was def using the WAN port on the router.

Modem-->Linux MCE --> Switch --> Diskless MCEs
                                            --> Wireless Router (DHCP off / Not Using WAN Port)

Yep... thats pretty much how we setup our Wifi routers. Glad you got your setup working.

I also can't seem to play/pause the video from the gyro mouse. Nor can I do any of the options listed in the wiki:

"When media is playing, you can use the normal keys on the i/r remote to control the media playback and volume. Or press F6 or the 'media' button on the gyro remote, and then move left and right to adjust playback speed, or move up and down to skip through chapters/tracks/channels/songs depending on the type of media. With the left and right movement you have both absolute and relative. Absolute means keep the button held down while you move left and right. This is quite useful with the gyro remote. Press the left button, and if you move your hand all the way to the left you are at the beginning of your media, all the way to the right and you are at the end. Or, tap and release the button, then when you move left and right you are in relative, or jog shuttle mode. Move slowly to the right for slow motion forward, further to the right for 400x forward, back to the left to rewind, and so on."

Thanks

The standard Gyration remote is not one of the standard remotes that has a template in lmce. The Gyro mouse functionality will probably work but not the additional remote buttons. You'd have to add a template yourself.

I get the following error when I try to boot:


ipconfig: No Devices to configure
/init: 1:Cant Open /tmp/net-eth0.conf

Kernal Panic - Not Syncing:  Attempted to Kill Init

This is the same error that I had gotten previously, and I thought that maybe I just didnt wait long enought.. but after waiting about 10 or 15 minutes before I figured it might be a legitimate error.

Suggestions?

Where do you get the error? at the MD as it tries to boot or at the core as it tries to boot?

It should work with the CD installer at least, see: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Testing_with_VMWare

VMWare is supposed to be able to controll the USB ports directly, but I don't think it can work the rs232 port.

Good point!... yep had not thought of that. So even if he did get the DVD installed under VMware he might have a problem testing it against his alarm panel.

So I cant run it on VM6 to look at it ?

One of my team is using VMware to do test installs... but I am not sure that he is using the lmce-0704 DVD iso. Let me find out whether he is and also what VMware version he is successfully testing under. I'll post here as soon as I can get hold of an answer to that question :-)

No spare machine - hence using VMWare to check it out, and "will it work with my alarm" before I go and spend money on a machine for it.

I downloaded using torrent which has it's own checking and ive checked the md5sum - so I dont think it's corrupted at my end.

Any debug to turn on to see why it's failing ?

Ok... after some discussion here we think your problem might be caused by the fact that the lmce-0704 DVD iso itself runs at least in part inside a vmware environment. So I wonder whether that is causing the problem ie your trying to boot the lmce-0704 iso inside vmware.... but it is already running inside vmware!

We're not familiar with what limitations this might have... but its a possible reason for your failures.

Does anyone know how to rerun the AVWizard. I ran it during the initial setup but the video output I had problems. I have tried just running the AVWizard executable from the /usr/pluto/bin folder but it does not seem to run using the whole screen.

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks.

If you can get into the Orbiter then you can run the Avwizard  from the Linuxmce menu screen.

So your saying the md5sum checksum is useless ?

Hmmm... no ;-)

Have you tried installing on another physical machine? ie different motherboard

Hi,
I would like to install some MDs on HDDs. I though the installation script would detect a running core and asked if I would like to only install a MD, but that didn't happen. Its just the regular installation of hybrid or core. All the machines get there ips correctly from the dhcp server on the core. Did anyone have an idea why this could happen or how to install a md using an other way?

If your trying to add the machines as pxe booted MD's then just set their bios's to pxe boot, connect them to your LAN and they will be autodetected and setup.

I have now - matches. Used torrent to download.

I've also burned to a physical DVD-R - same issue - but messages are sharp printers on screen rather than HP this time.

I've tried 4 times to install this now - all have failed. Is there a specific set of vmware settings required to install this ?

We're not doing very well so far !

its not a solution for you but... we've got several copies of the lmce-0704 DVD iso burnt and all have worked flawlessly... so it still sounds like you have a corrupted download to me.