I have posted a couple items in the installation forums, but for the most part, the rest of my comments are general so I'm posting them in the User's forum.
After installing LinuxMCE for the 4th time (and somewhat successfully) I was able to copy all our photos and music to the core into the public directory, and a few divx tv shows and movies. Slowly but surely they are starting to show up. For the movies, using the web admin interface, I managed to manually add them so I could finally see some HD 720p video output (not bad either).
My MCE IRD remote and blaster arrived today and that installed easily. That's another job for me, to figure out how to make it change the dish channels and shut off the TV, but since I'm no where near that (mythtv doesn't work) that will wait.
But I continued to make notes about the system throughout the afternoon. The developers may find these observations interesting (well, that's why I'm posting all my info in the first place).
-the dhcpd.conf file seems to be messed with. I had it configured and then my notebook would no longer get an IP from the wireless NIC, so I went back to look and it was back to what I would call the "defaults" and there were lines at the bottom that recognized my HP Pavillion desktop and the Dell notebook (I had to correct the Dell IP # and the usual router and assigned IP's).
At 3:29pm I had no keyboard or mouse response. The Gyro Mouse and MCE Remote worked. I rebooted the core using the web admin panel as I was unable to do any keyboard commands on the core. It rebuilt the orbiter stuff again. I powered off the notebook and logged out of samba as I was now finished copying my media over (and the core was busy cataloging my shared folders on the dell).
I started playback of an hour long divx tv show (ok, with commercials cut out is about 43 mins). I put it on pause a couple times, and while on pause for the 2nd or 3rd time (I was able to press Pause on the MCE remote, kewl) I went upstairs to spend time with my better half before she headed out to work a few hours.
When I came back downstairs, the core is once again ignoring keyboard and mouse commands. Even the gyro and MCE remotes were unresponsive.
Before I had headed back to the basement, I fired up one of my D-Link Media Lounges to see if it would find the core, etc. Couldn't get an IP address, so I gave up, went downstairs and found the core unresponsive as noted above.
So I had no choice but to hit the RESET button on the core (ouch). At 4:46pm it reboots, wants to rebuild the orbiter stuff AGAIN.
Now all my video output is off the screen on all four sides, just like what it's like inside KDE. Nice.
I went upstairs and set my other DLink to Static IP and it found a uPNP media server (the core) but there was no media available. Went back downstairs to find lots of odd messages on the tv screen, like:
EXT3-fx error (device sda1) ext3-find-entry: reading directory # 539037 offset 0
ata2.00 - exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
and stuff like that. Oh boy, so I have to hit RESET again! (ouch!)
It reboots, looks fine.
However, I boot up another machine in my office (hard wired) and nothing. Go back and check the dhcpd.conf file and it's overwritten again. I make the same changes I've done before at least 3 times, restart dhcp, now my machine gets an IP address fine.
Oh boy.
And I've yet to tackle MythTV, which still doesn't work.
When playing music, is it just me or do you have to play each song individually? That's rather lame. You should be able to pick a genre, an album, or the entire collection and say Play or Random Play or something. I thought I had seen something about Random but now that my screen is cut off on the left I can't see the pop-up commands when playing music. I'm glad the MCE remote has a STOP button.
Now I have another issue with a drive which I will talk about in another post.
