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Messages - webpaul1

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16
Developers / Re: All Developers, please read.
« on: August 31, 2007, 04:49:34 am »
Zaerc,

That's not at all what I was saying.  For example, today, I got word from the DVD replicator that was supposed to be delivering the LinuxMCE mastered DVD's today (there are already almost 1,000 orders) that there's a problem with the dual layer dvd-9's layer 0 & 1 overlapping and they need the .iso split and all sorts of stuff like that which was all totally new to me, and I ended up blowing off a very important meeting because I had to spend the whole day buying new, high-end dvd-DL's, a new type of dvd burner, installing/fighting tons of software issues, etc., to fedex off a new master by 5pm since so many people are waiting.  And when the discs come in on Monday, I'm going to have address & mail 1,000 dvd's.  This in addition to fixing lots of mantis's (note how many I'm working on at any given time), etc.  And so on.  I'm still working on LinuxMCE all the time constantly, including every single weekend.  I didn't put this much effort into this for the past 9 months to 'abandon' it.

What I was saying is that I'm at 100% capacity right now, and I keep getting pressured that I need to be doing more (like writing docs, organizing development efforts, etc.), but I can only do so much and that's why things are moving so slowly.  Therefore, for the best interest of the project, there should be a team / community that works together.  And I will continue to devote 100% to it like I have since last year.

I get lots of emails each day related to LinuxMCE.  Many are asking for new features and making business offers and stuff like that, and I just don't have the time to read let alone respond to all of them, and if there are emails from developers offering to help or submit bug fixes (which is badly needed), I may miss them. 

That's why I think that there should be a 'community coordinator', who doesn't really need to be a coder and understand coding, but just someone who's organized and can take the lead in handling the incoming requests and filtering out what's important and what's not.  I'm not trying to 'abandon' LinuxMCE, just ask for help since this I realize that I can't keep up with everything.

17
Developers / Re: All Developers, please read.
« on: August 30, 2007, 09:07:58 am »
Thom, thanks for emailing me...

I lived and breathed this code for many, many months, and went through just about every module and every class, stepped through all the calls, etc.  Yes, it was DAUNTING, and took many, many, many months to get a handle on what was going on.  The problem I have is that (a) I'm kind of lousy at documenting and don't really know how to document stuff well; kind of a self-taught programmer that lives for coding, but without any formal training on proper documentation techniques, etc.  (b) I'm not the most organized person at setting up teams, etc. (c) I'm *totally* swamped.  I spent such a huge amount of time getting the first release done, and then the second release that I neglected everything else (like my job), and, given the volume of forum posts, emails, etc., have trouble responding...

So, what I think would be in the best interest of the project is to find (1) a volunteer who wants to be the community coordinator, with the mission of recruiting developers, coordinating requests and activities, and kind of 'buffering'.  I could give this person my cell phone number so they can call me anytime.  Since I spent so much time with this code, if somebody wants to know "how do I do this", or "where is this code", or "how do these pieces fit together", I could probably answer those questions in a minute and point someone in the right direction.  Secondly, (2) we really need a volunteer who knows how to write proper documentation that can be the official 'standard bearer' for deciding how the architecture should be documented, coordinating with developers that are doing new code to be sure it's properly documented, and maybe, if anybody is up to the tedious task, coordinating other volunteers who want to go through some key pieces of the existing code and document them.  I think that if there was a somebody who knows how documentation should be done laying out the rules and providing examples, it would be easier for devs like me who don't document stuff to have examples to follow.

I think that have 2 people fill those roles would make a huge difference in the ability to get a thriving development community, and would establish some sort of order so other devs could join the team and not get frustrated.

The big, major task that needs to be undertaken in LinuxMCE is redoing the GUI (Orbiter/Designer/etc.).  You guys read the announcement from KDE that LinuxMCE is being merged into KDE, right?  Well the plan is to completely rewrite the GUI using QT 4, instead of SDL, leveraging a lot of the eye candy type effects that KDE has built in, and create a really powerful design tool that allows the creation of a GUI that is dynamic and highly skinnable.  Then KDE could get their guys who did the Oxygen and Plasma UI work to help with LinuxMCE, and the really good graphic artists/theme artists would have a rich toolset to create beautiful gui's.  The goal is that the GUI would be flexible enough to do neat effects like having the highlighted options in the main menu 'zoom' and 'explode', like the bottom icon bar in Mac OS X, but without hardcoding all that behavior.  Right now the behavior is very much hard-coded into Orbiter, so it would be difficult to create a new theme that does much more than change button images/placement, without re-writing a ton of code.  I've talked to the Pluto guys and they have an invested interest too in seeing this done because their commercial clients like Monster all want their own distinct GUI's that look nothing like what the other Pluto-based solutions are doing.  They can't currently do this with Orbiter.  It's my understanding that Pluto and perhaps even a few others are considering sponsoring developers to work on this new GUI, since it would be such a huge task and would go much faster with full time devs instead of purely part time volunteers.  I know there's discussions going on right now with KDE developers, Trolltech (the QT guys), and Pluto about how to get this going.  It's going to be a big task because afaik nobody else really has such a dynamic UI that is theme-able.  MythTV has a very theme-able UI that you don't need to write code for, but it doesn't have eye candy, 3d effects, etc.  Then you've got UI's like Windows MCE which have cool effects, but they're hardcoded and not theme-able.  So it seems like this is going to be pretty special if we get it done right.

If we get somebody to do the 'community coordinating' role, maybe that person could try to find a good dev who knows UI design well and could architect such a UI, and I can work on finding that person a sponsor so they can put all their efforts into it.

18
Feature requests & roadmap / Re: Support other Linux distributions
« on: August 23, 2007, 06:53:48 am »
Ubuntu (gnome) doesn't let you use a window manager that supports composite (alpha blending).  Only Kubuntu did.  LinuxMCE 1.0 made you do a dual boot to run a special LinuxMCE-patched X with a separate manager, then reboot to use gnome.  With KDE they work together with teh same window manager.  Note that LinuxMCE is getting merged into KDE (see KDE's news).

19
Developers / Re: KDE a little overkill?
« on: August 23, 2007, 06:47:11 am »
>> why not gnome?

It's the window manager--not the desktop.  KDE allows you to use a window manager that supports compositing (alpha-blending).  Gnome only works with a window manager that doesn't support X11's composite extensions, so you can't do the nice alpha-blending ui stuff under Gnome.

20
Developers / Re: I am forbidden to download the Designer...
« on: August 23, 2007, 06:45:45 am »
Try finding the same wiki page on plutohome.com.  Most of those wiki pages were imported from Pluto's, and maybe Pluto's page has the right link.  If not, you can try building it from source.  There's an src/designer directory, and build the c# HAData and then HADesigner with ms vs.net.

21
Users / Re: Windows music files copied to LinxMCE "Public" not seen
« on: August 23, 2007, 06:42:34 am »
What I would do if you know sql is edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf, remove the # in front of the 'log' line, and then reboot, try to browse music, and look in /var/log/mysql/mysql.log to see the query that is select * FROM pluto_media.File.  If the records are in the DB, something else is going on.

Also, in the media browser, click the 'sort' and try sorting by filename as well as artist/title.

22
Users / Re: Where I can place the button to open/close the gates?
« on: August 23, 2007, 06:40:41 am »
You can add any scenario under any category.  Go to advanced, configuration, scenarios in the admin site, and put it under security, and assign it to some rooms

23
Users / Re: Why doesent if find my videos under video?
« on: August 23, 2007, 06:36:19 am »
The folder is correct.  Try giving them all an .avi extension.  Does that work?

24
Users / Re: regarding format for video files
« on: August 23, 2007, 06:35:49 am »
>> can Linuxmce play video_ts files - combining them to a whole file
yes

25
Users / Re: UI2 Keyboard Shortcuts ? For Remote Mapping !
« on: August 23, 2007, 06:34:34 am »
I don't use LIRC, but I know the code is in LIRC_DCE, and some people say it all works fine.

26
Installation issues / Re: LinuxMCE = a Nightmare
« on: August 17, 2007, 06:28:56 pm »
I'm biased obviously.  But the fact is that when I use my pc (hardware is shown in the video wiki), everything comes up and LinuxMCE is running and playing in less than 25 minutes.  All the hardware is found and drivers are loaded.

I've also used XP MCE on the same box.  It doesn't come with drivers for the network card, video card, or sound card.  Getting the network card drivers is a problem because without networking I can't download them.  So I have to use a separate pc to get them online, then put them on a flash drive.  I tried running Vista on that same box, but it doesn't work.

So Linux has an advantage in that all the foss drivers come as part of the distro, so if you're stuff is supported, and you have a recent distro, it's all detected and works without hunting for drivers.

However you are right that there are is a lot of hardware that's not supported under Linux, because many manufacturers don't make Linux drivers, and it's often hard for the foss community to reverse engineer them without proper documentation.  So Windows has the advantage in terms of breadth of driver support.

But this is disclosed right in the install process.  That's why there's a list of known-Linux compatible hardware.  And the bottom line is that when you do have Linux-compatible hardware, Linux is *MUCH* more stable than Windows.  I've left my main LinuxMCE box running in a stress test loop for over a week starting and stopping media every couple seconds and randomly choosing menu options a couple times a second.  One week later it's still running.  On the other hand, as any Windows user will tell you, after 1 day of using Windows heavily you pretty much always need to reboot, or you have some crash.

27
This should not be a problem.  I talked to the Pluto guy who wrote it.  It's not a backdoor, and neither Pluto nor anyone else will have the corresponding private key.

the key is auto-generated at install time for each installation and the purpose is to allow media directors to have ssh access to the main box so that they can do things like modify their boot sequence, access teh database, etc.  It's not a common key, and nobody else has the private key, except the media directors.  The key is unique for each install and generated on the fly when it install time in these scripts:

BootScripts/SSH_Keys.sh
ssh-keygen -t dsa -C "Pluto auto-generated key" -f $Dir/$Key -P ""

And the corresponding key is put on the media directors in their boot images.  This sounds correct and should make it safe.  Please confirm that we're all in agreement that this is ok and not a cause for concern.  I was in a bit of a panic mode since I ordered 1,000 replicated dvd's from a mastering house (linuxmce is now sending out dvd's), and obviously if they have any back doors or security holes I have to stop the order and get it fixed.  So can you guys post replies confirming we're in consensus that this is not a problem?

28
This could be a left-over from that I didn't catch.  Sorry.  Let me check on this.  I did leave in the pluto remote assistance thing because pluto said it could be used by any 3rd party companies that wanted to offer tech support.  Let me dig some more and be sure I didn't leave in anything that's a security risk.

29
Can you see if you're getting any image out the VGA port?  That's the defualt active port when AVWizard starts.

30
Installation issues / Re: Black Screen
« on: August 17, 2007, 03:58:00 pm »
Try connecting a monitor to the vga port.  That is the default when av wizard starts.

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