Hi Folks,
Please can we close this issue

Sean, just edit the first post subject line to add a [resolved] on the end so others know. You should have permissions to edit your own posts.

Oh, ok, I see. That's better then.

Yes, I'd avoid the prompted upgrade for now. Upgrade (for linuxmce) is usually done manually, because it's important not to unwittingly upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 which is what the system generally wants to do. That will break things if you don't follow the prescribed route which is currently beta beta so not recommended for a working system.

Let us know if you get pushed to reboot again and what it is that appears to cause it. OK to drop to terminal if it seems to hang up on the black screen with mouse ptr again. You should, at that point, be able to log in but if you're at a dcerouter text login screen, it won't be with the lmce users that you created where the default password is the username. It will be the ubuntu login you created during the ubuntu install process somewhere. Typically you will have chosen a password at that point. That is the one you need to use.

Hi bhcv... welcome.

While the smart guys awake from their slumber I'll throw in my 2 bitcoins...

Did you install from a 10.04 iso burned to DVD?

I have a feeling that the point where things went South was the "black screen with mouse cursor".... this part can take a long time before the next stuff happens... how long did you wait before CTRL-ALT-F2?

CTRL-ALT-F2 drops you out of the graphical screens to a text terminal and should generally not be necessary at this stage - that sort of thing comes later when you want to do some tweaking and other work....but on a standard install you shouldn't need it.

It sounds as if it didn't get to the point of setting up the linuxmce users...  I would start again if I were you ;-)

Add your additional parameters to the 'Extra Parameters' device data in the webadmin for motion_wrapper.  These will be re-written to motion.conf every time the device starts.

J.

This worked very nicely for me.... only thing now is that I have another camera I'm trying to incorporate. I say "trying" because it hasn't shown anything but a blue screen yet but rule#1 should solve that one.

So... in other posts I got the impression that you have a single "Motion Wrapper" device and multiple Camera devices controlled by it. However, this will be a problem if the masking settings (or any other custom settings) need to be different for the different cameras (since they are set at the Motion Wrapper level).

So the question is-

Can I have multiple Motion Wrapper devices in order to allow me to customise the settings for each Camera? Anyone know? I know you can create them, I've tried, but will they work (I had the blue-screen for my 2nd camera when I tried but that may be due something else since I have it when I share a motion wrapper as well).

[Update: Rule #1 has solved my blue screen on camera 2 - a few regens and reboots later, both cams available sharing a motion wrapper device as parent but, presumably, also sharing the motion config settings... will leave it at this until after poker evening on Fri night so I can show off my neat security cams from the MDs. Thereafter I'll try switching back to two motion wrappers and apply Rule #1 a bit to see if I can get them going separately]

If it's the r8169 NIC that is giving you the trouble, I would recommend blacklisting it (the r8169 module) and using the r8168 driver from the Realek site instead.

Edit "etc/modprobe.d/blacklist" and add "blacklist r8169".

Run...

Code:

sudo update-initramfs -k all -u

...and then...

Code:

rmmod r8169

May help... see the rest of the related thread as well.

I'm not 100% sure that the NIC issue is ruled out.

You may be right but, from memory, I think I recall that there is a bit of a difference between a base install (ie what goes on your core) and a MD that is PXE booting. I'm no PXE boot expert but I think what happens is there is a small image that goes across to the MD to get it up and running... now that image can't have all the possible NIC drivers and modules loaded because it's got to be quite small so it may not include the relevant one, even if that one is available to a full 10.04 installation. That's what the whole wiki is supposed to be about - forcing the appropriate module to be in the PXE boot image. Often you don't have to actually download or install drivers... it's just a case of forcing the correct kernel module into the PXE image.

Can you give any more detail of the screen messages when the thing fails?

If it is a NIC issue, you may require the r8168 module... the link http://askubuntu.com/questions/79346/how-can-i-install-the-realtek-rtl8111e-version-8168-driver implies that this is what is needed instead of the r8169... this is outlined in http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/R8168.

But I don't want to send you on a wild goose chase here if the issue isn't an unrecognised NIC.... so those screen messages might help.

More than likely unrecognised NIC problem when it fails early in the PXE boot cycle... have you followed the Unrecognised_NIC wiki entry? http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Unrecognized_NIC

Hey, no sweat, it's working. At 4.30pm for some reason motion starting recording AVIs. It records them in /home/cameras/<device>/year/month/day/recordings.

Very neat. Well done guys... may be old but it works.

And the mask is definitely working too. May need a bit of refinement but a good start.

* posde didn't know there should be video files.

Yup. I think, from memory, it's in a folder called "recordings" somewhere in the same area as the snapshots. If I recall, they're .avi files of all the motion events with a datetime name.

But not at the moment... due to something I mucked up, I think. When I get them back I'll post more detail.

Very useful for reviewing what caused the event.

Super- it's there and when I add the motion_mask setting and quick-reload it definitely updates /etc/motion/motion.conf.

And I can confirm that the masked-out areas are no longer firing motion events which is certainly an improvement in my case.

The odd thing, though, and still to be confirmed, is that I didn't seem to have any video files. I had snapshots being generated, and definitely motion events because my gtalk is being notified, but there were no video files in /home/cameras/....

Will check that one out. Maybe I mucked up the config file somehow.

I've never set up more than one camera but I'm close - he camera is there, the cat-6 cable is there, I just need to hook it all up. Now, when I do, will there be a new motion-wrapper for the new camera? Presumably there is one wrapper "device" for each camera? Otherwise things will go South as I can't use the same mask for each camera!

Yay, that's brilliant! Not at my system now but will give it a go as soon as I can, thanks for the reply.

If it works I will wikify. If it's in the wiki I will self-flagellate. Many thanks for pointing it out. I had over 300 motion notifications from my camera yesterday so I need to get the mask going pronto.

So it seems that even if you tinker with the /etc/motion/motion.conf, it gets rewritten every time the device is restarted.

Arrrghh... so you can't actually use a PGM mask to mask out areas of your image from motion detection or take advantage of any of the other features of motion? Is that correct.

Ouch. Guess I either need to dig out the rubber gloves and get into the code or it's back to zoneminder.

Woohoo, got it working 
Really is very simple. I'm getting messaged very time the dog wags its tail so a little tweaking of the motion settings might be required but this is pretty cool.

Will clean it up a bit and wikify and then possibly later look at making it more generic.

Yes, the generic makes sense if there is no such thing already... as you say, would be good to have the "actual communication" separated from the generic functionality... then people can write their own communicators for the sending end. Will first make sure I can get the direct version running though ;-)

Since I'm starting with security cameras, I thought of embedding a link in the notification to the camera in question (I'm using IP cameras so each is directly viewable via the web).... and as a colleague just suggested... done cleverly that could also obviate the need for dyndns if that was your only requirement since the current external IP of your network could be embedded in the link.

Hi all

Been trying to find a neat way to notify myself of events on my system.... I'm running weborbiter on my HTC so I don't get any notifications on my orbiter.
I had a brief look at notify my android but wasn't too impressed with that - have to get a premium licence if you want more than 5 notifications per day and you have to run another app on your device, register another username/password etc etc. It works but....

then I found this link below for sending messages to gtalk. Now gtalk is what I use anyway for IM on my phone so I thought it'd be pretty cool to use that to send notifications to myself. That way I'd get them regardless of whether I was at home or not too.

https://www.ebower.com/docs/ubuntu-scripted-gtalk/

Now what would be the best way of doing this? I saw the message below suggesting how to call a shell script as a command. Should be fairly simple to hook this up to an event - like motion detected on gate camera etc.

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php/topic,10768.msg74094.html#msg74094

Thoughts? I haven't tried yet but will as soon as I get a gap. If it works really nicely it might be cool to wrap the script in a DCE device that can listen for events directly.