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1

Users / Re: My (not great) experience with LinuxMCE

« on: January 04, 2008, 06:00:30 pm »

You're definitely right about the RTFM thing.  I read what I thought I needed but skipped over the DHCP thing.  I just it just perplexed me that a media center would be required to perform dhcp service as well. 

Hagen is correct that I am really looking for a media portal, not an all-on-one system.  I've never been a fan of all-in-one products.  Unfortunately I do not want a windows based media portal like the one Hagen mentioned, but it's nice to know it's out there.

My biggest gripe was with the video and that fact that I got no display whatsoever due to the oddities in the xorg.conf file that was generated by the AV wizard.  Once I fixed that, Sarah's walk-through didn't work either unless I went to a very low resolution. 

The homepage says "It is stable, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer skills."  That is what I think is misleading.  If I didn't know how to kill the X server and manually tweak xorg.conf, I wouldn't have gotten as far as I did.

Anyway, thank you for listening to my rant, despite my lack of RTFMing and pointing out my issues with minimal flammage.  It's appreciated.   

2

Users / My (not great) experience with LinuxMCE

« on: January 04, 2008, 01:22:39 am »

A long time user of XBMC, I decided it was time for a more powerful media center.  I picket up a media pc case for free from a friend and started looking around at various media centers. 

I first tried mythtv on debian etch.  The install went fine.  I had to do some tweaking to get X and nvidia working together nicely, which went fine.  I want a single interface that my girlfriend is capable of using for music and movies (like XBMC), but mythvideo and mythmusic weren't that great. 

After some googling, I decided to give this LinuxMCE a try.  I downloaded the DVD after verifying the md5sum, and I watched the demo video.  I must say, what a scam.  There is no way that is "just works" without knowing how to modify your xorg.conf and alsa setup, unlike what is preached on the home page.  I had to kill the X server (ctrl+alt+backslash) and debug the issues causing X to run incorrectly and my TV to show "unsupported mode."  It turns out that disabling the EDID is a bad thing in xorg.conf for my nvidia card.

Anyway, after that fiasco, the graphics kept disappearing while "Sarah" was talking during the initial setup.  I ran the AV setup again this time at 640x480 which kept the graphics on the screen, but afterward, I see that for some reason it's running its own dhcp server in stead of getting an address from the one I'm already running.

There is no option in the UI to change that, and since I don't feel like fixing it manually, since that is just going to be one of many more problems I'm sure (from the way things have gone so far) I am going to have to fix, I'm just going to scrap it for now. 

Again, that demo video is a joke.  There's no way a Linux novice could get this working.