I've been away for a week (CES) and just returned home. My pluto hybrid told me it had installed software updates and needed to reboot. I told it I'd do it later because I wanted to watch some videos. After an hour or two the controls started acting wonky, so I figured I'd reboot. Now it seems to be in some sort of reboot loop. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can fix this?
So it turns out that there were a number of references in the update index that was download to deb.plutohome.com with /Work/ in them. This directory didn't exist on the server. After editing the index the downloads began properly. That was the first issue, which took my friend and I a few hours to resolve.
The second issue was related to video drivers. I had a GeForce TI4200 in that box. This update deprecated that card to legacy drivers. Searching for "legacy nvidia" on these forums turns up
this post, wherein the poster says that after struggling with the legacy drivers and Pluto for a week he bought a new video card. Luckily I had a GeForce 5950 on hand, so I threw that card in. This brings us to the third problem...
After getting back on track with the video drivers, my OnScreen Orbiter wouldn't load. Seems that the custom timings specified for my projector in the xorg.conf were no longer functioning properly. After hours of troubleshooting this I was finally able to get it working again.
And the fourth and (hopefully) final problem... I had mount points specified in my fstab to an NTFS drive on my DCERouter and to Windows Shares on another machine. I mounted these to subdirectories under /home/public/data/audio and /home/public/data/video. Now, for some reason, I can no longer browse these directories through the Orbiter. Everything shows up and is mounted find via command-line, but the Orbiter won't let me drill down into these directories. I have yet to resolve this problem.
These problems got me thinking... I love Pluto, and everything that it's capable of. This system brings together everything I could ask for in a home management system. However, is there a better way to manage updates like this? For example, I generally do not install Windows Updates immediately, especially in an environment I'm managing. I wait a few weeks until I hear whether or not there are any issues, and then after testing them to make sure that they don't break anything I will apply them en masse. I don't seem to have that luxury with Pluto, as these updates happen in the background. Additionally, is it even possible to predict that the types of problems I've encountered may occur? I'm about to start on a new business venture and am seriously considering working out a licensing agreement with Pluto, but these types of problems are of great concern. If I was supporting a dozen clients and an update knocked them all out of commission, no one would be very happy.
At any rate, I'll end my rant. If anyone has an idea why my mount points aren't browsable I'd love to hear them.
And Pluto devs, thanks for a great system. Hiccups and burps aside, I saw the Monster demo at CES where everything was working like it was supposed to and I was wowed. Very well done.