Why are you making this difficult?
You're only going to wind up breaking things in half by not understanding the purpose of the system.
Sorry, I didn't think I was making things difficult. If I break something, then figure out how to fix it and contribute that back to the community, is that not a good thing?
The point of my questions was to gain understanding. If you are able to answer the questions, could you, please?
If I understand correctly, LinuxMCE is a whole home control system integrating converging 'technologies' such as Asterisk and MythTV into itself. For best results, it wants to be the gateway.
It does not appear to be 'current' in various aspects, such as a limited subset of dhcp. That is certainly true of the firewall interface. e.g. Bogon filtering.
LinuxMCE MUST _INTEGRATE WITH CURRENT SYSTEMS_, such as firewalls, routers, gateways, phone systems, media, and so on and so forth. It _CANNOT_ REPLACE them. A homeowner cannot allow a large block of time to elapse between turning off current functionality and complete and equivalent plus more functionality of the full promise of LinuxMCE. Particularly as the components of lmce progress faster than lmce itself. LinuxMCE total domination depends upon it becoming as ubiquitous as the internet browser.
It is in my mind that I could take another workstation (laptop) and begin building a home system (gateway + network services, e.g. ntp). I can build it up as time permits, testing at various points. At some point it will equal my current systems and I can leave it in full time. For the moment, I will not be using home controls, asterisk, or myth, I'm just building the gateway at the moment. Once integrated into my home, I'll move on to Asterisk, get that solid, then move on to the next piece. Some day, I'll move on to home controls. [Being in Canada, one of the problems is no vendor offered LinuxMCE compatible smartphones. To date.]
Given the learning curve of all 'this stuff' (LinuxMCE, asterisk, myth, not 'computers'), nobody is going to gain all this expertise overnight - starting on this learning curve, now, it seems to me, is a good thing to do to be ready for the future when LinuxMCE should be far more ubiquitous.
As far as I can tell, LinuxMCE is the only thing out there for what should become a standard home server box - controls, alerts, nannycams, (TV) scheduling, and the whole deal. A single box that understands the 'blueprints of the home' (rather than bits of data on different computers never integrating into a coherent whole), and the quite reasonable idea that everything in the home should integrate and cooperate with the best of FOSS breed of each element. And, being FOSS, can adapt and integrate new things into this whole as those things emerge.
If I have mis-read LinuxMCE, they may I kindly ask for a pointer to your FOSS competitor?
Otherwise, if you can help me by answering my questions, or even better pointing me to links that I haven't found that do, I'd sure appreciate it.
