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I was wondering if there had ever been a discussion on integrating social site into the project? For example, being able to populate the phonebook with your Facebook contacts or even being able to press a button whole watching a movie to check your twitter feed. This could even be extended to allow MCE to update your feed when you start watching a film etc.

Another idea could be a twitdeck-style screen to keep up to date while you're not using the screen, such as listening to music. Also, being able to set your user picture to your Facebook profile picture would be a nice addition.

Hi, I tried installing LinuxMCE to a USB pen drive last night and apart from the incredibly long install time it went quite smoothly. However, when I restarted my laptop I recieved a grub error 21.

What had happened was that grub installed into my laptop and wiped my MBR, so Windows was inaccessible and LinuxMCE was unbootable. Anyway, I fixed windows by loading the live disk but LinuxMCE is still unbootable.

So my question: How do I install Grub to the USB drive now that LinuxMCE is installed? Will it be just as easy to install to the USB drive on one of the college computers with the internal rive disconnected?

Has anyone tried using dvd::rip for converting dvds to any other formats? And has anyone tried using it in cluster mode?

I'm tempted to try it when I go back to college in September, I have a LinuxMCE server and 9 media directors so I'd like to try both normal conversion then cluster mode to see what speed gains are to be had.

Does MCE support embedded tags in MP4 files? I've been tagging a few movies in windows by adding cover art, actors, genres etc. and was wondering how wel they are supported in MCE or if I would need to do anything to the tags to make them compatible (I use mp3tag so changing the names of tags is simple enough.

I've reinstalled MCE (4th time maybe) and I'm having a bit of trouble with the NIC all of a sudden. he webadmin page only shows 1 NIC available, but I'm still able to use the internet through eth1 on the core. The media directors can't find them, and the webadmin page shows my external NI as being {extif}.

Should I wipe the /etc/network/interfaces file?

EDIT: MCE changed the interfaces file to use {extif} instead of eth1, I rewrote the file but if I choose to udpate from the webadmin page or restart the computer then it'll reset to {extif}.

I've finally managed to set up a RAID5 array and it has mounted successfully but doesn't show up in the media director. I also have the same problem with USB drives.

The RAID array and the drives used for it all have **RUN_CONFIG** as their status.

Using mdadm --detail /dev/md3 show that the array is fine but mdadm.conf has no record of it, only md1 (which failed due to needing to run some other commands to get RAID working in the first place). Surely it should be there somewhere, no?

As for the USB drives, they never show up in the pluto device list at all, which is frustrating when it comes to playing something from them. My only option is to open Dolphin and copy the files across manually, though since my main drive with MCE installed was set to public I have nowhere to put them that adds them into the Orbiters' media listings.

It's confusing the hell out of me. Can I remove the drives from the pluto database then rediscover them?

EDIT: Looks like removing the drive that MCE is installed on was a bad idea, now all I have is a blank screen on all the MDs. Is there something  can type into the command line to add the drive back to the pluto devices list?

I've just finished setting up 9 media directors and every one of them hangs after the line:

restarting openbsd secure shell server sshd
...done

I've tried opening a shell and trying startx but I'm told I'm not allowed (probably because I'm logged in as sambahelper). Have I missed something? I'm sure one of the media directors was working when it was on it's own, now nothing boots except the server.

EDIT: The webadmin page says they're all amd64 architecture but they're i386. The thing is, the media director that was working was set as amd64 the whole time and worked fine. When I changed it to i386 and rebuit the image it failed. I also can't seem to delete any of the media directors from the system.

Could someone please post the current sources.list file? I have no idea how to find the latest one and I'm using a slightly older beta atm.

I deleted a couple of media directors from the webadmin page and now non of the other media directors load up. When I start the PXE boot loader I get an error saying:

"/tftpboot/pxelinux.0" file not found

How do I fix this?

The main reason I'm suggesting this is so that I could set my profile image to my facebook image, then both could be changed dynamically. You can get your profile picture from:

Code Select Expand

http://graph.facebook.com/*YOURUSERNAME*/picture
so there would be no problem with the url changing when profile pictures are updated.

You would also need to add a refresh time for downloading the image for local storage.

I don't know how difficult this would be to add but I'm assuming it can't be too difficult.

EDIT: Also, you can add "?type=" then either square, small or large to define what size image you want to use. Square is 50x50, small is 50 wide with variable height and large is 200 wide with variable height.

Is there any way to install a media director onto a USB stick and then use it to boot several machines into LinuxMCE? There are several computers in the lab that I want to run as media directors but they don't support PXE booting. I tried finding something that goes on the USB drive and uses PXE to boot off the network but I can't find anything and think that loading a media director directly off the drive would be easier.

Shoudl I just install Kubuntu 8.10 to the stick then install MCE on top of it?

I've tried the guide on the wiki but everything is up to date. I even used asoundconf list to find out what sound cards were being used and all I got was "NVidia", which is technically any of the 4 output methods available on this board. aplay -l told me I had analogue, digital and HDMI but so far I've heard nothing come from this board.

I really need help.

P.S. Is there any way to change the output without running the avwizard again?

I updated MCE this morning with apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and now when I go into webadmin I can't get the "rebuild image" button on the media director page to work. Usually it goes to another shell style page and does some stuff but nothing happes for me.

Should the Asus AT3N7A-I motherboard be using version 173.14.12 for the NVidia drivers? I'm having trouble gettin audio output via HDMI and I think this may be the problem, though I am a Linux noob (see previous posts) so it may not.

I know the core has 195.36.15 installed so I don't know why my MD (It's a netbooting think client btw) would use an older version.

Here's my new list of problems:

1 - Software RAID doesn't work. Using the admin page I get as far as telling it to create the array and I get the "degraded, rebuilding" message, then when I leave the page it says it's failed. I've tried with all the drives formatted to ext2, all the drives bare and ticking the spare disk box for each disk. I've also tried creating a RAID 5 array using the command line (mdadm) and it just tells me "error opening /dev/md0: No such device or address"

2 - Flash drives do not appear in the manage drives section of the orbiters. I can navigate them with Dolphin and copy files into the public folder but they won't appear in MCE and as such won't show their files in the video/audio/picture browser.

3 - I have 2 DVD drives in the manage drives section, despite only having 1 drive. I put in a disc and both drives showed the album was in it.

4 - Videos are jumpy. It worked fine in 710 but now is jumpy as hell. My copmuter has 2 Radeon HD4850s so this should not be a problem (P.S. Even in 710 I couldn't get transparency to work).

5 - My thin client won't netboot. It gets so far through the boot process (the last line I see is after the attempt to connect to the yp server or something, but there are a few lines after that), then shuts down i.e. the Kubuntu splash comes back up and it does a proper shutdown, not just dying and starting again.

I can't remember if there are more but any help I can get with any of these problems are extremely welcome, this is part of a college project and I'd rather have my server workin than write a report on why it failed.

Cheers,
          Matthew Simpson

Hi, I've installed Kubuntu 8.10 and updated the packages before my LinuxMCE install but some packages are missing. Furthermore, when i installed LinuxMCE using the desktop icon, serveral packages were skipped again. Then, when I restarted to open the AV Wizard, i got an error about a resume file not being found. The AV Wizard did start, but in the corner of the screen. Once I'd finished it, I was left on the original resume file screen. I can use Alt+F2 to start the X Server and load the desktop but not much is working in terms of MCE.

P.S. Every time I load the desktop I have to open the terminal and type:
sudo -s (then type in my password)
ifup eth0

so that I can get the network connection working. I had to remove NetworkManager from the startup to get the connection working in the first place.

Hi, I tred to use the Pluto MO on my Nokia N96 but it just crashes out before I see any screens to do with the program. The program should work on my phone fine (S60v3) but I've had no luck.

Anythign I can do to get it going? I've been plagued with problems with LinuxMCE and I'm starting to lose all hope I can actually get it running and doing anything I want it to.

Cheers.

I'm having trouble getting Linuxmce's installer to load up. I have an Asus P5Q and have set up 3 1.5TB hard drives arranged in a RAID 5 configuration (using the onboard RAID controller).

The installer failed half way through booting up with the unable to seek error and in red writing "no hard drives found".

Any ideas as to what happening?

Hi, I'm having problems getting LinuxMCE installed on one of the computers at college.

I'm using the 8.10 DVD from the download links and so far have kubuntu installed and running. The problem comes from the installer link that's left on the desktop. I click it and it opens the terminal to start doing whatever it does, then after about a minute of doing nothing a get roughly 100 lines informing me that the program can't find files at certain locations (despite being able to load those links in konqueror).

After another short while it tells me that MCE is finished installing and to restart to finish configuring MCE. However, when I restart the computer I'm back at the shell to login and startx.

I tried a network install of MCE and it kept asking me if I was root. A fellow student informed me that kubuntu had no root user.

P.S. I'm a total Linux noob. It took me 4 distros to get Linux on my PS3, ended up with YDL. Fedora just wouldn't do anything.

Hi, I'm currently part of a project at college where we're trying to set up a media server and thin client to play media on an HDTV. We're currently looking at what operating system to use and have come across LinuxMCE.

Unfortunately , I haven't been able to figure out whether or not LinuxMCE would be network bootable (a feature we decided on for ease of updates), and whether or not Blurays could be ripped to the server, then accessed from the thin client to be played back on the connected tv. This is anoter important feature as we want all media files to reside on the server so that upgrading with further thin clients is as easy as possible.

Thank you for your help and I look forward to any feedback you can offer me.