Messages

16

Users / Re: 0710 release date clarification

« on: May 03, 2008, 05:09:01 pm »

The RC1 post on the front page reads: "On April 25th we will go ahead and release it and have it mastered to DVD unless anybody finds any significant problems with it." Should I parse this as

Bort, you can pretty much consider RC1 the final 710 release. There is an issue with USB-UIRT on 32-bit but that should be fixable via update; as soon as I verify that, symlinks from final to RC1 will be made on the mirrors.

Also, the project has become very "closed" (for an open source project). As a prime example, I spent months learning the source code and the inner workings, spent a great amount of time refactoring and fixing the X10 code that has been broken for years, and got my changes sponsored by a Pluto dev. However, when trying to get on the dev team I was pretty much told that I wasn't good enough, and would have to continue finding someone to sponsor my SVN updates (which would cut my productivity in half, which I simply don't have the time for). I have many improvements for the Lighting and Climate plugins that would be of benefit to many people.

Jon, all I asked was that you contribute more than one patch before I gave you commit access. I've contributed to a number of open source projects and not one gave me commit access after making one contribution. Admittedly you contribution was very cool and I had Dan Damron review it, but commit access means your code is of such long time high quality that I don't need to review your contributions and I can trust that you will continue to maintain the code for years into the future. I suggested that you might get another developer to review your code until he was confident enough to sponsor you for commit access. We really need all the developers we can get, but I've given commit access to people in the last few months who then disappeared entirely. I had to admit to myself that this type of churn is not good for the project, and so I instituted a relatively easy to meet bar for commit access; submit a few patches, or get sponsored by an existing svn committer. Just because you don't have commit access does not mean you can't call yourself an LMCE developer, some might even prefer that because it means they are not responsible for day to day code maintenance, the person committing your code took on that responsibility when they committed your code.

-- Daniel

17

Users / Re: USBUIRTs and low energy lights?

« on: May 03, 2008, 04:43:32 pm »

You might also try swapping brands. IR devices are confused by any light that cycles near either 22khz or 56khz, depending on the remote. The operating frequency of a CFL is usually somewhere between 20khz and 60 khz, but there are CFLs that operate on frequencies up to 1Mhz and there and ones that change their frequency when dimmed. Unfortunately, CFL bulbs come with neither emission spectra nor operating frequency on the box. So you need to experiment and demote the failures to utility shed lighting.

18

Users / Re: ftp://builder32.linuxmce.com 530 Login incorrect

« on: April 26, 2008, 05:44:54 pm »

Just get the RC1 iso...

The anonymous ftp is temporarily disabled to allocate more bandwidth to the torrents.

It will be back soon.

19

Installation issues / Re: HAUPPAUGE WIN TV PVR150 MCE

« on: April 26, 2008, 04:26:46 pm »

The --with-driver option tells LIRC which receiver you are using, not which remote.

20

Installation issues / Re: Issues with 0710 RC

« on: April 25, 2008, 03:58:50 pm »

What'is the login and password for upgrade?
Thanks.

The password depends on what you currently have installed, but if "linuxmce" does not work. I've written some instructions on resetting account passwords this morning, available here: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Resetting_Account_Passwords

21

Installation issues / Re: Issues with 0710 RC

« on: April 24, 2008, 08:42:22 pm »

I used the CD's because that was whats recommended by the devs to install onto the core. Prior to the dev's recommendations,I tried the DVD install onto a core machine and it didn't setup correctly.

The CD is much slower and is only recommended when the DVD install won't work.

The linux driver in LinuxMCE are newer than Kubuntu, but nvidia has newer unix drivers on their website that add better support for 8x00 series cards.

Not true, if you go to nvidia's website and use their driver matching form they will recommend the 169.12 driver for the 8500GT card you use. This is the very same driver which LinuxMCE installs.

LinuxMCE touts"flexibility"..its stiff hardware requirements proves otherwise.

LinuxMCE touts the flexibility to do a lot of things no other system on Earth can do. I will personally flame anyone who tries to say LinuxMCE  has wimpy hardware requirements. MythTV and asterisk both have tough hardware requirements on their own, add the alpha blending UI2 does and you need to spend at least $20 to $30 on a video card, and you need a to spend $15 on a second NIC for decent networking. If you also want to be able to learn IR codes a $50 USB-UIRT device is highly recommended as well.

Having this system only work with a handful of devices seems like it isn't really geared toward the public which the video seems to suggest. The public has newer equipment, especially if they discover this project. I just believe that hardware support should be the first item on the developers agenda. It will just make the project more accessible to more people. Myself, I have the time and money to buy a newer television and PC parts. I don't see the point of having to go out and spend money on older parts when the newer stuff works fine in other operating systems.

Hardware support is high on the my agenda. But the way you get support is not by complaining, but by helping. I do not have the same hardware as you, if you want your hardware supported then you should do some reading on xorg.conf make the required configuration changes and then post an article in the wiki about how you got the hardware working. Having that description available will make it possible to update the X configuration script to configure your type of card. Plus if we need something like the PCI ID of your card to automate this we will tell you how to determine this.

22

Users / Re: Media during upgrade to 0710 RC

« on: April 24, 2008, 07:30:37 pm »

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Upgrade_to_0710

23

Users / Re: Autoupgrade option for LMCD -any plans for 710 ?

« on: April 24, 2008, 07:28:38 pm »

There is an update #5 which will install some packages on 704, so that you can later upgrade to 710 using the dual layer discs.

24

Installation issues / Re: 710 RC - Changelog questions

« on: April 24, 2008, 05:25:49 pm »

1. MythTV updated to the latest fixes (is this .20 or do we now have .21?)

Latest MythTV 0.20-fixes. One of the first things I looked at when getting involved with this project was the stability of MythTV under LinuxMCE. So I patched bugs in both MythTV and LMCE to make them play well together. I was still modifying the LMCE scripts for MythTV a few days ago to get it running a bit better. MythTV 0.21 is a great new release with lots of features, but it would have taken a few additional months to stabilize it fully under LMCE and we wanted to make that part of the 804 effort and not the 710 one..

2. VDR Integrated into LMCE (Does this mean it is automatically installed, or will there still be choices?)

During the install process it will ask if you want MythTV or VDR, and the one you select will be installed.

3. Fixed internal drive detection for MDs (does this eliminate the constant messages regarding it finding an in use drive?)

It should.

4. Upload pic for rooms is converted to png to be displayed both on page and on orbiter. (so now any image is automatically resized?)

Don't know, haven't tried this myself yet... I've mostly been testing for regressions

Also I did not see mention of 2 other enhancements important to me
  a. ddamron's PLM code with PNP detection included in this release
  b. jondecker's CM11A code included in this release

I believe jondecker's latest is included. But I think ddamron was a bit busy with a new job in the last few weeks to squeeze his stuff in. ddamron's stuff can be installed by an end user; well, except maybe the PNP. The plan is to combine PeteK's and ddamron's effort into a single module that can handle both types of Insteon controller devices.

25

Installation issues / Re: Issues with 0710 RC

« on: April 24, 2008, 05:03:49 pm »

I would like to know, or point me to the right place, if the mythtv package in this RC1 version or in the final release will be able to install and manage a PVR card only on the core and then see the direct TV only from the core or also from all the MD?
Or I can see direct TV from the MD where I've installed the PVR card?

You will be able to watch LiveTV on any MD. The startup is a little slower on a remote machine than a local one, but MythTV will seamlessly record and stream LiveTV to any one MD per recorder at a time. The recording hardware itself can be on the core or on any or all of the MD's.

26

Installation issues / Re: Issues with 0710 RC

« on: April 24, 2008, 04:56:21 pm »

I'm very eager to try the RC, but... How about the DL disk for amd64? There is an MD5 checksum available, but no way to obtain the disk. Could you provide us with one?

The DL AMD64 disc is being pushed to the mirrors, and will be available there first. See http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Mirrors and check the status of each mirror, or wait for http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Mirrors_0710_RC1 to be updated as the mirrors get the files. We will also add a torrent for this disc once the other disc's are well seeded. The Dual Layer discs are not as popular and we want to get the DL i386 one well seeded first.

I would also appreciate a clear instruction on which disk will allow the several types of upgrading, preferably in a table listing the ISO name, upgrade paths, core arch and MD archs.

For upgrading 704, your best bet is the dual layer i386 disc. It will do a full upgrade preserving your media. Second best option is the dual layer AMD64 disc. It will also preserve your media and do a full upgrade, but is a we bit less stable.

For a new install on a blank hard disk or a 710 beta upgrade, the single layer i386 or amd64 discs are best (again we've fixed a number of 64-bit only bugs since beta 4, but it's still a AMD64 newly supported architecture). The will quickly install the RC and have a couple options for preserving some -- but not all of your beta settings. If you want to preserve all the settings and media, follow the backup and restore procedure documented via link from the release notes. This procedure is tedious but has been tested to work.

For a complicated install with partitions and/or another operating system on the same hard disk as LMCE, use the CD's. First you need a clean Kubuntu 710 install on a partition using the bootable kubuntu install disk from ubuntu.com, then you can use the CDs which runs a package analysis that can take several hours. This will install the needed LMCE packages, but you will probably need to do some manual configuration to get the video running well and may need to remove some incompatible ubuntu packages if it is not a clean unmodified kubuntu install.

27

Installation issues / Re: Issues with 0710 RC

« on: April 23, 2008, 07:17:29 pm »

The dual layer discs have upgrade from 704 code included + both i386 and amd64 MD's + video.

The dual layer i386 disc is available as the LinuxMCE_Install_Upgrade_DVD_for_i386 torrent.

28

Developers / Re: Linspire CNR

« on: April 17, 2008, 09:13:10 pm »

Bad idea, it will most likely update packages that will break LMCE functionality.

29

Developers / Re: LMCE Scripts - Spread sheet mapping out scripts

« on: April 16, 2008, 06:14:04 am »

I think you missed one of my responses. The stuff about telinit was only intended, by me at least, as an example of why working start,stop,restart would be useful for the kdm script.

The telinit example was twofold: 1/ you could keep things as is with init levels, but with a working stop on the kdm script, a developer could switching to the single user level to do something like install new video drivers then switch back to the regular run level instead of needing to reboot. 2/ you could also create a new runlevel for AVWizard, so that you would not need to reboot to run the AVWizard.

Both of these examples require a root priviledges to execute, but this is ok; you don't want non-priviledged processes to do either of these things.

30

Developers / Re: Adding FULL support for other regions/country/languages

« on: April 11, 2008, 04:45:57 pm »

Hi, any translations need to go into the DB, so you will need to coordinate with "Programming Dev Wizards" but the actual translation can of course be done independently.

To see the strings in English type this on an LMCE core:
   echo "SELECT PK_Text, Text.Description, Text_LS.Description AS TextToTranslate FROM Text, Text_LS WHERE Text_LS.FK_Language=1 AND PK_Text=FK_TEXT;" | mysql -uroot pluto_main

If you can hand the developers a text file with the PK_Text number followed by a translation of the TextToTranslate, then we can do the rest.