Welcome - its good to hear a new user's experience getting things set up.
Installation:
As long as you select recommended hardware everything goes without a hitch. Thanks to the AVwizard setting up audio and HDTV resolutions is much easier than manual ways. Kinda wish sometimes this tool appeared in standard distros. Only downside is the ATI problems, although this i believe is related to the driver from ATI itself.
Yes, installation only has a very few quirks at this time. If you search around, you'll pretty much find that NVidia will be your only suggestion for video cards. This may change as ATI's open-source drivers develop, and VIA's open-source drivers improve.
Functionality:
Very good, having most devices plug and play is definatly good. Being able to use my remote straight out of the box is what i want from a media center. UI2 is also quite plesant and fancy to people. Only improvement I would particulary like is a way to turn flikr off if i don't want it. I have hundreds of my own pictures that I like appearing on the screens around the house, its just disappointing when your mum walks in and some raunchy pic from flikr shows up or a picture that dosnt display well comes on.
You can turn off flikr and use your own photos (if you're using 0710 that is). Just log into the web admin (192.168.80.1 in your web broswer) and there will be a section under Files & Media. You can disable flickr, and tag which of your own photos to use in the rotation.
Event creation: this has two halves to it, on one hand i find it easy to use if i want basic things like lights down at sundown. Which is good. However say i want some lights down at sundown say my outdoor lights. But want my lights inside my house to come on an hour before sun-down as the house gets dark around that time i find i can not find such abilties in the event creation tool although im convinced people have done it.
Events/Scenarios/Responses to Events are a source of confusion until you get some experience using them. Scenarios are groups of commands and appear as buttons on your orbiters.
Events are fired upon something happening (criteria), and responses to events are the commands (a command group) that execute if the criteria evaluates to true.
With that said, you have a few ways to create events... For your example, in the web admin just go to Timed Events, create a new timed event with the time you desire (in 24 hour format such as 21:00 for 9 o' clock etc.), and use the lighting wizard to select which commands to send to which lights.
Also, if you want more control (criteria for your events) go to Advanced->Configuration->Events and here you can do pretty much anything you want.
Media final organisation: this is where i feel Linuxmce lacks behind abit. For movies this feature works very well and happy. I just click the file search for it on amazon and volia. Only problem occurs when a film dosnt exist on amazon but does on IMDB. Would be useful if there was a manual feature to just type in an IMDB number (like in Mythtv) when i struggle auto-searching for a film and get it to pull down data that way.
I felt this way also about media organization when I first started, and I know a lot of other people did too when they first started out. But as you use it more, you will see the power in it and why it is the way it is. When I want to watch a movie, i just hit the Video scenario on my orbiter.. I don't have to browse through paths etc, my video collection is just there, whether it is stored on my RAID array on the core, a NAS in the closet, or some other samba share I have running or even a dic in a disc drive on one of the media directors. However, you can choose a path navigation on the orbiters (under options) to display by filename - here, directory structure is preserved. I do think you will have better luck though working with LMCE's way. Learn how to tag your media with attributes (performers, genres, you name it) in the web admin. This gives incredible searching power. For instance, if I'm watching "The Terminator" - I can choose to see a list of actors (performers) of that movie, select one, and have a list of all of my movies for that actor delivered to me.
There are 2 ways to tag your media from the web admin.. You can use Files & Media -> Coverart to assign coverarts and attributes from amazon.com. Another way is almost a hidden gem. Under Files&Media -> Media Files Sync, you can do much more than just sync your database. Use it to browse your files one at a time and edit their tags directly(even though you are in Media Files Sync, you don't need to sync)... You can even download Amazon.com coverarts and attributes from here. It is my perferred method for managing my media collection as it gives you full control of all of the attributes you may want to set.
Same goes for your TV shows. You can even give them a separate media subtype and make a button just for TV shows on your orbiter. Also, keep in mind that what the orbiter displays for each file is defaultly the Title attribute of each file. THat is a good place to start if you have any cryptic filename.
Just take some time and learn to tag your media, I think you'll see things a bit differently once you get the hang of it.
Features that would be sub zero cool- Voice control and Voice response. Now if this could be there goodbye any other media center. Think something like SARAH from In A Town Called Eureka. Although my girlfriend might be a little un-nerved by a 'Good-evening Professor Falcon, Would you like to Play a game of Chess' but i would find a chess playing house very good. :p
Its been talked about... There is even some source code in svn. I'm sure that some day it will be a reality.
Raid: more of an off-topic one. But i have a raid 0 array of 3 drives. I add it to linuxmce my editing the mdadm conf file. I then add a device to linuxmce as an internal hard drive as it dosnt pick up the raid device and i specify /dev/md1 say. It then does set up the device and appear. However theres data on these drives already but sorted into the linuxmce structure. It dosnt add symlinks in for me, but if i add them manually they have a tendancy to disappear. Until i remake the sym link then rerun a media sync. Any ideas what could be causing this?
You will find that LMCE does some things on its own (automatic scenario generation, rewriting custom xorg.conf files, symlinks etc.). This is needed so that the system just works for people with little or no technical skill. Of course the downside is that for advanced tinkerers, it has this side effect. You can always change the source to your liking and get rid of these if you had to however.
Also, LMCE does have a built in RAID system. In the web admin, go to Advanced->Configuration->Raid. The system is a little crude, but makes it very easy as well. I have also found that if you create a RAID array through LMCE's admin, you must be patient! It does not do a good job of alerting the user to the status of the array, so if you add one and it is verifying integrity, you would not know and probably figure that it just didn't work.. But if you are patient and check back the next day, it would be there and all would be well. So thats the last thing to learn, patience - sounds rediculous, but there have been countless times that I swear something wasn't working, but i gave it enough time and chilled out and all was fine
Thanks for sharing your experience, good luck with your setup
