Messages

Zaerc, sorry for suggesting you weren't contributing.  That wasn't fair.  I put my heart into lmce, so I'm appreciative of everyone who contributes and keeps it going.

Zaerc.  Your comments are just plain wrong.  All of them, in every way.

>> 1.) if it is so trivial, then why haven't we still not recovered after months?

As a background, I had an svn server which was the official LinuxMCE SVN for a long time.  But, it was slow and there were some connectivity problems, so Hari and Daniel setup a new SVN server (CharonMedia) for LinuxMCE, and my old one wasn't used anymore.  Sometime in August I was testing a way to use UPNP for streaming media and committed some test hacks into my *old* svn server to test a proof of concept.  Unbeknownst to me, at some point the svn commits from the *old* server, which I thought wasn't used anymore, got committed into CharonMedia.  It *is* very trivial to revert an svn commit.  I do it every single day when a programmer commits something that breaks the builder.  It takes < 60 seconds.  You just do: svn log, note the rev #, and then do an svn revert.  No biggie.

I think Thom will confirm that what he and Hari and Daniel have been struggling with for months isn't figuring out how to revert that svn commit.  They're sharp guys, they could have reverted it in an instant.   Rather the struggle has been trying to setup a build environment and get the 0804 or 0810 release out.  In general the guys who are vocal and complain are *not* the ones who do the work.  Those of us who do the work, like Daniel, Hari, Thom, myself, etc., know it is a *HUGE* task to get each LinuxMCE release.  I worked 7 days a week, 16 hours a day without a single day off, for almost 9 months to get 0710 out, *and* I had a paid, full-time staff working on it the whole time.  What's taking Thom, Hari and Daniel so many months is getting the next release out; not reverting an svn commit.

>> 2.) and lose just about all the improvements/fixes that were made over the past 6-12 months.

What improvements did anybody lose?  If you lost something it has *nothing* to do with me.  Thom never mentioned that you "lost" stuff.  You really don't understand the concept of svn.  An errant svn commit doesn't make you *lose* anything.  That's the whole point of svn.  You have a history and can revert any mistakes, and everything is recoverable.

>> 3.) he was building a new commercial product that has little to do with linuxmce in the linuxmce SVN and could have at least done so in a branch.

As I said, I was *NOT* using LinuxMCE's SVN at all.  The LinuxMCE SVN is on charon media.  I have never committed anything to it.  I committed something to my old svn server not knowing it fed into the LinuxMCE SVN server.  And, it had nothing to do with the commercial product anyway.  Like I said it related to UPNP streaming.

>> If "_who really did the 0710 release_" were actually concerned about linuxmce and this community,they would have helped out instead of leaving us

"Leaving us"  I'm on Thom's, Hari's and Daniel's buddy list on Yahoo IM, and they all have my phone number, and I'm online at least 15 hours/day.   Plus I have regular contact with Hari and Daniel.  Who left?  Further re: "concerned about linuxmce"...  Ok, let's compare...  5 years ago I sold a very nice  in Miami, moved to Romania, where I lived in a tiny hole in the wall for *years* working 365 days/years on LinuxMCE.  Every dime I ever had went into LinuxMCE and paying the team in Romania to keep going on it.  For 4 years.  Do you realize how big LinuxMCE is, and how much code there is, and how much work went into it?  Why would I have done that if I didn't "care"?  And what contribution have you made that you feel you can judge me and say I haven't done my fair share to contribute?  Remember, it's *free* software.  People doing this are volunteers.  Every time someone donates their time to work on it, it's a gift.  Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.  And certainly don't say that somebody isn't doing enough to ensure that you have a nice media server that you don't have to pay a dime for.

>> an anonymous announcement for their new product (that was created at our expense).

At your expense?  How was it at the expense of anyone in the LMCE community?  What you mean by "at our expense" is that up until June, every line of code in LinuxMCE, 5 million lines of it, was written by myself or the full time staff of Pluto.  The *only* contribution in 4 years was 60 lines from Tinia.  So it was *very* easy for the LinuxMCE community to 'coast' up through 0710 because nobody in the community had to do anything.  Pluto paid for the servers, all the developers, everything.  And the community got it for free.  Which is fine.  I don't have a problem with that.  But what's so whacky is that all you guys were constantly screaming "death to Pluto".  Do you remember what you and Barry wrote in that post?  You wrote: "We hope Pluto (ie aaron.b) will just die"...  "We'll be much better without them".  "Death to Pluto".  "Just die"...  Now, in this thread you write that you feel Pluto was "leaving us" (literally) because Pluto isn't doing all the work for you anymore and the community is going through a rough patch to take over.  Do you realize how absolutely *insane* that position is to call for the death of someone and then cry that he's "leaving you"?  Jeez.

>> that 0710 release was delayed almost 6 months (presumably mostly due to fiire's commercial interests)

Again, a totally whacky statement.  Fiire was Pluto's *ONLY* paying customer.  All the work Pluto did, our sole activity, was to write software which was incorporated into LinuxMCE.  There was no diversion of resources for a "commercial" interest; Fiire's interest and LinuxMCE's were the same: a stable 0710.  That's what Fiire paid Pluto to do, and put a lot of pressure on us to fix hundreds of bugs and make many, many improvements, all of which made it into 0710.  So how on earth do you say "0710 was delayed because of Fiire"?  Where on earth does such a ridiculous statement come from?  There wouldn't have been an 0710 if it wasn't for Fiire.  Fiire is what was driving our work because they paid us a license fee per unit.  So, again, going back to that flame post....  LinuxMCE was written completely by Pluto/me.  Fiire was Pluto's paying customer.  You guys were adamant that Fiire must die.  You guys put negative comments *everywhere* in the wiki saying 'death to Fiire', boycott Fiire, etc., because they're "commercial" and trying to build a business by selling LinuxMCE-compatible hardware.  But that commercial business is what paid for LinuxMCE's development!  Do you realize that if Fiire had been successful there would have been an 0804 release already??!!  Do you realize that your "burn Fiire to the ground" comments were really the worst thing you could do for LinuxMCE?

You question how much "concern" I have for LinuxMCE.  WTF???  You guys who are so insistent on destroying any commercial company that tries to build a business which can fund LinuxMCE's development hurt LinuxMCE way more than I ever could.  You say you're "concerned" about LinuxMCE, but then you go for the jugular and want to shut down everyone who pays to keep LinuxMCE going.

LinuxMCE's saviors and guardian angels, btw, are Hari, Daniel and Thom.  Hari somehow managed to get a bunch of kick-ass servers with mega bandwidth to keep things going.  I don't even know who's paying for it.  Did you thank them btw?

>> these people obviously have no interest in working with us, apart from selling us their products.

For years "those people" have done nothing but work day and night on LinuxMCE and contribute everything to the community.  You guys just assume that there's a bunch of fat cats getting rich off the community.  You are *SOOOOO* far off you can't imagine it.  I know the guys at Fiire.  They also gambled everything they had to fund development of LinuxMCE because they couldn't sell hardware unless the software was stable.  Nobody was getting rich, or even paying the bills, off Fiire.  Every dime went into funding LinuxMCE.  A couple guys in Fiire worked without a salary for months to keep things alive.  One suffered major health problems as a result of the stress and will never recover.  The fact is that when Fiire wanted to sell their products they wanted to do everything open source.  But, we couldn't find *any* video drivers that were stable enough for a commercial product.  nVidia was the closest, and their drivers crashed all the time and had bad video tearing.  ATI, Intel, etc. were much further behind.  I personally met with some top execs at nVidia, ATI, and Intel begging for them to put resources into their Linux drivers.  But they all said there was no commercial market for it.  Yeah, duh, it's because guys like you are so opposed to commercial companies using Linux and proclaim 'death' to any commercial company that tries to build a business around open source.  (shoot self in foot)...  nVidia, ATI, Intel, etc., have an obligation to their shareholders to only go after commercially viable markets, and all of them said "Linux is just for servers, there's no commercial market for Linux media centers."  Only closed platforms, like Broadcom and Sigma, have stable Linux drivers (ie TiVo).  Via agreed to develop a rock solid, commercially viable Linux driver and license it to Pluto & Fiire.  Fiire went in with the best intentions and started marketing the Fiire stations based on those assurances from Via.  As you know, the Via drivers weren't as good as we all expected them to be.  So, Fiire bought back lots of Fiire stations from angry customers.  Fiire's employees went without pay so the money could go to buying back Fiire stations.  *Nobody* was getting rich off Fiire.

That's why I wrote in my posts that if there's a company, like Fiire, that gambles on offering a LinuxMCE media center, rather than taking the safe route with Vista, it's in the LinuxMCE community's best interest to support them, not demand that they stop using LinuxMCE (ie switch to Vista).  When Fiire's customer service went to hell, it's much better, imho, to listen to the reason 'why' and offer constructive criticism as opposed to saying "die you bastards and rot in hell".  (Oh, and then cry that you've been "left" when you get your wish)

I just wonder if you realize how much these hateful remarks hurt the community?  You understand that most of the reason why guys like Thom, Hari, Daniel and me make so many sacrifices to develop open source is for the personal satisfaction, since there's little money to be made.  As an extreme analogy to make the point, it's like the people who donate their lives to, for example, Habitat for Hummanty (not that LinuxMCE compares to a home of course).  These people volunteer their time and money to build homes because it makes them feel good to do something nice for the community.  Imagine if after they spent months building a home to give to an underprivileged family, they hand over the keys to that family, hoping to put a smile on their face, and instead the Dad looks at the house and turns to the volunteers and "you filthy bastards giving me that nasty tile floor!  I want Terrazzo damn it.  If you cared about me and my comfort you'd have given me Terrazzo!  Die and rot in hell!", kicks dirt in the volunteers face and throws the keys at them.  How do you think the volunteers feel?  Do you think they feel like putting the effort into getting this family Terrazzofloors?  Do you think they feel excited about volunteering to build the next house?  Bottom line: I think if you showed more appreciation for the people who put in so much effort the community would be a lot better off.

Justin,

Just a crazy thought, but something you might want to consider.  The Fiire Station 1" is the exact same thing as the VMPC VM7700.  But the VM7700 costs around $1,200.  Via gave Fiire a very special price because Via wanted to go into the Linux market and Fiire committed to buy a bunch of them.  Fiire said $1,200 was too much for the Linux hobbiest community, so Fiire made a special deal and was selling them well below the wholesale price of a VM7700.  You bought it for something like $900, right?  If you're not in the U.S., it will probably cost you about $200-300 to ship it back.  Which means that if you get your $900 refund, you'll only net $600-700.  I don't know if the VM7700's are still selling for $1,200, or if there's much of a market for them, but if there is, my guess is you could sell it on eBay or something similar as a "VM7700", not a Fiire Station (cause there's no difference), and get more than the $600-700 you'd net by getting it returned.  Just an idea.

I'll also send you an email so we can discuss off-line.

Aaron

Justin,

I know for certain that there was no intent to defraud.  We signed contracts with Via to license their drivers, and so Fiire committed and bought a bunch of Via hardware under an OEM agreement.  Everybody was under the expectation that Via's drivers would work as stated in the contract.  Personally, the people I hold most responsible are Via because everybody moved forward based on their promises that their drivers would work well.  But that's beside the point, and doesn't ease your frustration....

One thing you could do is check your credit card statement.  As far as I know, all U.S. customers were actually charged by Polywell, not Fiire.  I know there were many refunds issued; that's what caused this mess in the first place.  Most people who bought the Via-based md's were content to use Xine for media playback and only used MythTV to record from the linuxmce core.  This is what was shown in the LinuxMCE demo video, and that's the reason why you never see MythTV running on the Via boxes.  I've been told the people at Fiire's call center were told to advise customers that Via's drivers don't work with MythTV, and that there was some reference to this on the web.  Of course I don't know if that actually happened since it was, after all, an outsourced, overseas call center.  AFAIK, Polywell and Fiire did issue lots of refunds to everybody who complained about it not running on MythTV.  I was also assured that despite all the returns, everybody who ordered a Via system got a brand new one and that they never tried to pass off a previously returned unit as "new", but instead sold them at a used PC auction (apparently for a fraction of what they paid for them, which is why they lost so much money)...  I do believe that nearly everybody who complained sent back their Via-based station got their refund and there were only a few at the very end that slipped through the cracks.  I know they bought back lots (like hundreds) of Via stations and I've only seen complaints from a couple people who bought right at the time that Fiire stopped selling Via systems from Polywell.  I'm sure there's no genuine attempt from anyone at Fiire to defraud.  The Via boxes that came back were, afaik, all returned to Polywell.

RE: Jeff,Blake,Jane,Adrian not responding....  I know Blake was a U.S. guy and he stayed on after the Via mess and Fiire's financial problems and worked a few months without a salary, but eventually had to leave to support his family.  I assume Jane and Adrian were part of the overseas call center which isn't there anymore.  Jeff, the owner, has been having some health problems so I've had a hard time getting through to him either.  Like I said, the Via driver debacle really hurt them a lot.

Going forward, starting with the new gen of stuff, all the fulfillment and orders are now handled by PC Design Lab.  AFAIK, essentially all the operations are now handled by PC Design Lab, and I've heard only positive things about the service PC Design Lab is giving current customers (CAVEAT: PC Design Lab aren't Linux experts, so the service is limited to order fulfillment type stuff, not LinuxMCE trouble shooting).  Justin, what I wasn't clear on from your post is...  Did you actually return your Via-based Fiire Station and not get your refund?  Or do you still have it, and you didn't get an RMA?  Also, who did you pay?  Fiire or Polywell?

I'm with Pluto.  Hari pointed out all the negative comments recently about Fiire.  Since Fiire is the main reseller of LinuxMCE hardware, and Fiire pays for the LinuxMCE servers, bandwidth, etc., and had full time developers working on LinuxMCE, and was the first online shop to take a gamble on LinuxMCE, it was obviously a real concern.  First, it should be noted that Fiire is a Google checkout merchant (ID: 640928394967237), and according to Google, Fiire receives an average rating of 4 stars out of 5, which is well above average.  So not all customers are disgruntled.

As far as I could tell Demus was the main person who was really upset and posted derogatory comments in the wiki.  So I sent Demus an email asking him to explain what made him so mad and what he wanted Fiire to do about it.  But I could never get Demus to reply to me.  While there's no excuse for bad customer support, it's definitely in the best interests of the LinuxMCE community if the merchants that stick their neck out and sell LinuxMCE hardware succeed so that more merchants come on board.  So while it's good to point out the problems, and inform consumers, I think the goal should be to fix the problem rather than put them out of business.  If Fiire goes out of business that only means less support for LinuxMCE and it'll be harder to get new merchants to offer LinuxMCE solutions, and thus harder to fund LinuxMCE.

The truth is that Fiire has had a lot of problems the past few months.  Basically, the Via drivers which we licensed from Via (I organized that deal) didn't work with MythTV, and were closed source and binary-only and locked in to a particular kernel.  Via promised over and over and over again to fix them, but never did.

In the end, this presented a really difficult situation for Fiire because Fiire not only had to buy back many, many Fiire stations, which used up their cash, they also had to stop selling the hardware, which cut out their revenue, and they needed to invest money in developing new, custom hardware based on the nVidia graphics chip, rather than Via, after they already invested a lot of money on the Via platform.  The reason for the custom solution was that there was no existing off-the-shelf solution that used an nVidia graphics chip and was thin enough to go behind the TV, which was the main thing Fiire was offering; we all searched and searched trying to find an existing solution so they wouldn't need to build custom hardware.  There were some off-the-shelf solutions based on Intel chips, like the ones from Aopen, but we were never able to get any video drivers except nVidia's to do alpha blending over video.  And it cost a lot and took a lot of work to get the new hardware off the ground.

So when they've got cash out to buy back the old Fiire stations, cash out to pay to develop the new hardware, and no cash in because they stopped selling the Via-based stuff....  Well you get the picture.  They had to choose between keeping the customer support call center (yes, it was an outsourced overseas call center), or keeping the couple engineers they had who were working on the next gen hardware....   And then when they really need to get the new hardware on the market *fast*, and it all boils down to a couple high paid engineers working really long hours, they can't pull the engineers off to answer the phones.  So that explains why there was a period of time when nobody could get through.

Anyway Fiire recently came out with the new products.  Product fulfillment is also now handled by PC Design Lab instead of Polywell.  And, from what I understand, all orders for the new products are in fact now being shipped within 1 week of receipt.  I reviewed the invoices and the shipping notices, and it is true that the new products are shipping out on time, they seem work well, and the fulfillment/shipping is back to normal.

Fiire hasn't been able to startup the call center again, so it still can be hard to reach them for customer support.  However, the shipping/fulfillment side appears to be fine now, and I haven't heard of any new complaints since they switched fulfillment houses to PC Design Lab; I've only heard good things about PC Design Lab.  And at least as far as shipping/order/payment issues, PC Design Lab seems to be really responsive.  Also, I'm not sure the overseas call center was all that necessary in the first place.

I'm sure it will take Fiire a while to fully recover from the Via debacle.  And it hit Pluto really hard too because we organized the whole deal and had other customers besides Fiire that were going to license the software and sell LinuxMCE solutions, but all those deals fell apart all because we couldn't get stable video drivers.

The problem isn't apathy.  Nobody's getting rich here.  We're just a bunch of computer geeks working 14 hour days to make ends meet and trying to get this stuff off the ground.

All the discs were sent out.  There were several hundred of them.  They're just shipped regular mail.  I'll add your name back to the list as a 'lost' disc and so you'll get another one with the next batch that goes out this week.

Re: your idea of ready for prime time = "LinuxMCE will load and run on a wide variety of hardware quite nicely"...

Hardware compatibility is a major challenge with Linux itself because many hardware vendors don't publicly release the specs for their hardware, nor do they release Linux drivers.  This is nothing particular to LinuxMCE.  LinuxMCE has a ton of it's own code (ie Pluto copyright), in addition to 3rd party FOSS (like MythTV), and the underlying foundation that Linux/Kubuntu provides.  Repeatedly we heard reports of "[whatever/Myth/Xine/MPlayer/Asterisk/etc.] works fine in Kubuntu natively, but not in LinuxMCE".  I heard this a lot especially re: MythTV.  Many, many, many times we tried to diagnose the issues by getting the exact same hardware the user reported he was using, and trying to run [whatever] both within LinuxMCE and on a clean Kubuntu install without LinuxMCE.  Nearly every time we ran into the same thing: The same problem existed both with and without LinuxMCE, and LinuxMCE had no effect.

Reading your post, it really doesn't sound like LinuxMCE could be causing the things you report...  Specifically:

1.) surround sound
LinuxMCE doesn't include it's own media player.  It uses Xine and MPlayer.  Both Xine and MPlayer talk directly to alsa with no intervention from LinuxMCE.  It doesn't make sense that LinuxMCE could have any effect here.  I've reproduced lots of issues with sound cards, and I know that some sound card drivers are pretty flaky, but I've never seen the sound behave worse with LinuxMCE than without it.  RE: "linuxmce doesn't change volume", a message is sent to app server, which calls the code:
void App_Server::CMD_Vol_Down(int iRepeat_Command,string &sCMD_Result,Message *pMessage)
which calls:
snd_mixer_selem_set_playback_volume(m_MixerElem, (snd_mixer_selem_channel_id_t)0, Volume);

That's a function call in Alsa, afaik, and it sets the master volume in alsa.  So I don't think LinuxMCE does anything special with the volume.  As far as surround sound, if you have the same settings in alsa & xine.conf both with and without LinuxMCE, it doesn't make sense that it works without LinuxMCE but not with it.

2.) ui2 w/ alpha blending

RE: "If we can't fix the nvidia driver, then we need a work around."  The video tearing is *awful*, and has prevented us from a lot of commercial deployments.  But it's always there when you turn on compositing, whether or not you use LinuxMCE.  And it's in the nVidia drivers.  We've nagged nVidia for 2 years to fix it, but they don't.  And the ATI, Via, Intel video drivers don't work well either, again with or without LinuxMCE.  The only "solution" we've found is to use non-X86 hardware (like a Sigma 8634-based set top box), where you get commercially licensed drivers.  This is very unfortunately because this hardware isn't available to the FOSS community.  But if you turn off alpha blending (ie ui2 with masking) most of the bad video tearing goes away and the video is acceptable.

3.) problems with mythtv

>> While watching tv, I can press "y" to change tuners...

LinuxMCE includes the stock MythTV binaries.  We don't modify them.  It doesn't make sense that this would work in a stock MythTV install and not with LinuxMCE

4.) random lockups!

All of LinuxMCE's modules run in user space and cannot cause lockups like you describe; they can cause core dumps, but not hard locks.  Every time I've seen lockups like you describe, it's something at the low-level, like kernel modules or drivers.  And 99% of the time it's the nVidia drivers.  I always have had the same lockups both with and without LinuxMCE.  The newest nVidia drivers, 169.12, have fixed some bugs, but seem more prone to lockups than some of the prior versions, though for some reason they're pretty stable on the 7025 chipsets.  For some reason, the drivers that came with LinuxMCE 0704 worked very solid with the nForce 6050 chipsets.  Now, the nVidia drivers in 0710 seem to lockup sometimes on the 6050's, but they are solid on the 7025's.  We have about a dozen test machines that run in constant stress-test loops day and night, so we're able to see clear patterns.

>> It just couldn't hold itself together.  Sad day....

The frustrating part about the post is that you're blaming LinuxMCE, but I didn't see anything concrete that gave real evidence that the problems were caused by LinuxMCE.  If there was a back trace, or a log, or something like that to show that LinuxMCE did something, then we'd be able to fix it.  For example, before the system hard locks there's usually a kernel panic.  If you connect the serial port to another console you can get a dump of the stack trace when that happens.  We've reseached hundreds and hundreds of kernel panics.  Most of the time it's the nVidia drivers.  Sometimes I've seen problems with the drivers for sata, ethernet, usb, firewire, etc.  But I've never once seen anything in LinuxMCE cause a lockup.

In my home I'm using as my core/hybrid a system based on the msi k9ngm3.  It has been running continually, used several times a day, since 0710 was released without ever crashing.  The main caveat is I don't use the TV capture because I've found the itvtv drivers lock up all the time. 

I agree with you completely that it's very important to the future of LinuxMCE that it runs on a variety of hardware.  And if you can report something specific that LinuxMCE is doing, we can get it fixed.

>> I'd have to rewrite them in LUA... and learn LUA...

For right now we're not really looking to run your 'powerful' gsd devices on a low-power box like that.  It's really just for the basic control of TV's and Receivers.  These are all really simple things that take only about 1 hour to do in GSD anyway, and normally the GSD code is nothing more than: <$"POWER_ON"$> type of stuff.

Control of basic serial devices, like tv's and receiver's with rs232 ports, is done with generic serial device, which uses embedded ruby.

We're working now on a port of LinuxMCE that will provide basic home automation control and a/v control on a very cheap platform (think $50 access point with 4mb ram).  We're running into a problem with GSD, though.  Ruby is just too big and heavy.  99% of the gsd devices don't need the power that Ruby offers.  All they do is string parsing and formatting.  For example, the 'set volume' command takes an int from 0-100, but a Yamaha receiver wants the volume as a hex value from 0x00-0xff.  So, for the yamaha receiver, all we use Ruby for is basic math (i*2.55) and formating (decimal to hex), and calculating a checksum, which is the string sent to the receiver.  All the serial port control is done in the C-code of GSD; the Ruby engine is just used as a built in script engine for basic string manipulation.

There are some really sophisticated GSD based devices that use a lot of Ruby; like the EIB.  But, for the really basic control of simple serial devices, I'm thinking it would be nice to allow use of a lighter weight scripting language to do the string parsing.  That way, those devices could run on very lightweight platforms.

Does anybody have any comments on this?  Anybody with experience with Lua, or perhaps who could propose alternative languages that might do what we want?  I thought about embedding PERL, but it seems to be heavy, like Ruby.  We could just do basic bash calls, however, bash doesn't really have a C-language interface afaik that would allow the C-language DCE device to easily call functions in bash and get return values.

Comments?

pedplar, would you be willing to enable remote access and let us take a peek to see why it's not detecting your drives so we can fix it and release a patch?  you can send me a private email at: aaron.b [at] plutohome [dot com]

I found them here: http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu-releases/kubuntu/gutsy/

We did find an issue.  Some of the stock Kubuntu packages needed for Bluetooth and SqueezeBox support are not in the deb cache on the 64 bit RC DVD (they are on the 32).  This is not new; it was always like this.  But we never noticed until yesterday because the system quietly pulled these handful of packages from ubuntu.com without anybody noticing.  Until yesterday when Ubuntu released 0804 and their servers were bogged down and denying connections.  Then we found that adding bluetooth and squeezebox did not work.  They will start working automatically, however, once Ubuntu's servers go back on line and the packages can be retrieved.  We are patching the RC dvd's so they include these missing packages and in the formal release.  There does seem to be a major issue that one user reported where ripping to windows shares doesn't work.  But rather than holding up the 0710 release, since so many people are waiting for it, we'll go ahead as planned and do a maintenance patch soon, unless there are other serious issues.

The process for doing an upgrade is explained here: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Upgrade_to_0710

Regarding Sparkie's post, the suggestion to remove the official doesn't make sense.  For the 0710 release we had a mandate that we must following the same sequence shown in the 0704 demo video on the same hardware and get the same results.  We've done the set of steps in the 0704 demo video over 1,000 times, and we didn't release 0710 until it worked every time.  I think a lot of people find the demo video very helpful because this way you know if you have a certain set of equipment and follow a certain sequence you will get a certain result.

Sparkie, in your case, you said right from the beginning you're not using the same equipment and didn't follow the same sequence.  You used the CD's, rather than the DVD, for example.  The use of CD's shouldn't have caused the failures you described, however, it was disclosed that using the CD's is very slow because the Kubuntu install cd's don't contain the original .deb files for packages that are already installed.  LinuxMCE needs them in order to create diskless boot images for your md's and it takes a very long to rebuild them.  The failures are probably caused by hardware differences.  For example, it sounds like your video card wasn't recognized by the nVidia drivers.  Your assertion that we didn't use the current drivers is wrong.  The drivers in LinuxMCE are actually NEWER, not older, than the nVidia drivers included in the Kubuntu 0704 release.  We found the nVidia drivers in Kubuntu's 0704 didn't work with all the new motherboards with the 7xxx chipsets, so we upgraded.  Also, regarding the iMon, I too have a HTPC case with an iMon VFD+Remote.  It doesn't work at all with anything under Linux, and I called the manufacturer and they said it's not supported, and the FOSS projects that reverse engineered other iMon hardware don't work with the new iMon stuff.  So for that you need Windows at least for now.

Regardless, it's more helpful if work with us to identify the source of your problems rather than just say things don't work.  You issue #1 and #7 are normal.  #2, #6 and #8 I think are because nVidia's Linux drivers don't work with your card.  #3 sounds like a bug and if you send us the logs /var/log/pluto/*New_PnP_MD* we can see why it failed.  Re: #4/#5 I'll look into it.

I added the hooks necessary to start adding shoutcast and youtube, and created shoutcast and youtube plugins, and generated the plugins in src, and put some sample code in the youtube plugin.  It's explained here:
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/MediaSourcePlugin

Has anybody looked into SkypeCasts since they're free?  The other call-in number I saw could be expensive for some, like, Hari, who afaik is in Austria, would pay $.69/minute:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/03/78032_HNskypesocial_1.html
https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/home