Returning user looking for 8.10 assistance

[Armor Gnome]

About 4 years ago I had a nice small lmce install going at my place in Arizona.  Since then I have had to relocate and ended up in living situations where I couldn't set up properly.

I am now living in Michigan and able to run cables and with the help of my roommate develop some neat little toys for home automation.  I have been wracking my brain and body the last week trying to get a few components going.  I have been through every wiki, searched all forum pages I could find and have put the effort into trying to write my own templates.  If another user who is fond of challenges can simply point me in a few new directions I would be more than grateful.  Without running down my entire log entries or build I will jump right to my biggest issues.  With these resolved I will be happy saying the system is running, and I can devote more time to developing new add-ons.

Core/Hybrid: stable, using latest 8.10.   ( Only issues with reps was some language packs )
This machine was built 4 years ago with a complete 'compatible parts' list.

Issue #1. Analog Camera ( composite outputs, one audio one video ) connected to WinTV-150.  No matter how I try to device pipe or motion wrap this I can not get the feed from the /dev/video0 to generate on my orbiters or admin site.  I did find one user post that said his composite port inputs worked when he told the media director wizard that it was Dish Network>Satellite Box>XXXX.  Using this trick I was able to cat /dev/video0 > video0.mpeg and view my feed.  I can also view the feed on the media director but not as a camera and not with motion detection.

- The ability to watch television is not important at all for my household.  I have decided it will be easier to buy a DVB capture card for that purpose down the road and only use the WinTV-150 for camera feeds.

- I have several D-Link 930L motion IP cameras set up as Generic Motion IP camera under Motion as well.  On the template for motion wrapper, it lists 1,8 for capture type ( card or USB)  Is it possible to have two motion wrappers on my system?  Has anyone found a way to force motion wrapper into taking both type of inputs?



My clonezilla disk is wearing thin with all the re-imaging I am doing after breaking my set-up experimenting!

[JaseP]

Why not try the 10.04 install? L3me has been working on it, and many are having success with it. Just a thought...

[Armor Gnome]

Stability and personal experience with 8.10.  For media playback which was 9/10ths of my original setup 8.10 worked flawlessly for me.

When I came back to the forums and wiki after this break and saw the new progress I didnt think the dl for 10.04 was far enough along in its development for me to either:

a: get a working system going
b: contribute anything to the real 'programmers' who were just developing it

With the frustration I am having though with getting things connected I will take your suggestion and backup 8.10 now to load 10.04 this afternoon.  Thanks for the reply.

[l3mce]

I recommend using the DVD to install.

Any issues you have with that I will be more than happy to provide any support necessary. It is a much cleaner process... and MD functionality is embedded. No need to run Diskless_CreateTBZ.sh at all.

Check out http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php/topic,12520.0.html

[purps]

Stability and personal experience with 8.10.  For media playback which was 9/10ths of my original setup 8.10 worked flawlessly for me.

When I came back to the forums and wiki after this break and saw the new progress I didnt think the dl for 10.04 was far enough along in its development for me to either:

a: get a working system going
b: contribute anything to the real 'programmers' who were just developing it

With the frustration I am having though with getting things connected I will take your suggestion and backup 8.10 now to load 10.04 this afternoon.  Thanks for the reply.

I am a user also. I found 1004 to be a lot more stable/easy than 810, and that was many months ago now. Things have only improved. I will be reinstalling soon, and I will not hesitate to go 1004.

Cheers,
Matt.

[Armor Gnome]

Thank you for the responses.  Like I said the move to apartment life took me away from following lmce, not my appreciation for the helpful people here.

So last night I pulled down the latest SQL items from web-admin while I slept. This morning I was greated by 10.04 (ish)...  My kernel however was still old of course so I browsed around a bit and decided to reinstall @ 10.04 from DVD to update everything at once.  My house uses a 3G Internet signal so I am dl'ing at a friends place tonight.

I could easily search these issues and I will attribute them all to my crazy path to 10 but,  is any variety of motion, kmotion or motion2 working with the DVD install?  I had some aliasing issues with my nvidia 195? driver that worked before except without twin view. 

I spent some time on eBay this morning and picked up the HDhomeRun for my primary video capture device.  I noticed the analog pvr cards like my wintv150 are worth pennies.  I am going to build a seperate box filled with them to act as a surveillance machine.  Could this be booted with an image as a MD?  I know some resources are shared and this wouldn't record from the cameras unless an event triggered it.

Z-wave got cheaper!  I picked up the Aeon labs USB device to get started and found a few switches and plugs for under $10 each!  Between that and the USB irt units I will have enough to keep me busy.  Full system list and custom event overview in a couple of weeks.

[Marie.O]

Nothing has changed between 810 and 1004 with regards to (k)motion(2)

[Armor Gnome]

Plugging away with getting 10.04 up and running on my machine the last few days.  I have had some "ahh haa!" moments and some frustrations.  I have almost got to what I would call stable and ready to be backed up with clonezilla, only to find something not quite recognized or installed correctly.

My biggest difficulty has been with my hard drives.  Seagate 160g (sda) Seagate 250g (sdb) Seagate 1000g (sdc) Seagate 250g (sdd)

First install:  160 -> 20gig install partition mounted as / , 10gig swap , 130 gig formated as xfs marked do not use.  Three remaining drives where xfs and marked do not use.
Second install  160 -> 30 gig install, 130 gig xfs, all other drives xfs and marked do not use
    blew away all formatting and replaced all with ext4
Third install: 160 as install ext4 (told it to use all of it just to get the thing going, all other drives marked as do not use and ext4

My issue has been the detection of these drives in lmce.  I continually get lmce 'discovering' new drives.  I left it on overnight and woke up with 13 drives listed in my devices of web-admin. It discovers them as 1001meg drives and I have to ignore them.  My list of unknown devices in advanced>config>unknown is constantly growing.  I am about ready to redo my installation after I pull out all drives except the 160 and pull out my winTV-150 as well.


What package and configuration of gparted allows you to format in XFS?  I believe I am missing something because its greyed out in my available format types.

[tschak909]

apt-get install xfsprogs should get you XFS.

Also, why are you doing these unusual formatting schemes? Just accept the default.

-Thom

[l3mce]

apt-get install xfsprogs should get you XFS.

Also, why are you doing these unusual formatting schemes? Just accept the default.

-Thom

That.

Just let the thingy do its thingy. Then if you have a large media drive you want to add afterwards, then go ahead and format it XFS... you do not want your system running on an XFS partition. It's unique journaling system is really really good at streaming large files, esp media... but it isn't very good at dealing with tons of small files being constantly accessed.

[Armor Gnome]

I let the thingy do its thingy!

I am taking notes on this latest installation and so far have a really smoothly running starting point to clone and hopefully break with lots of testing. =)

The xfs was never put on the install partition, what I was doing was trying to set up my storage drives ahead of time before the lmce install.  Based on things I have read on this forum I was hoping to accomplish the following:

Small LMCE partition (20ish gigs) for the sake of backing up frequently.
XFS file system on my media storage drives based on recommendations for 'new' drives on the system.
Avoiding the trouble I had with LMCE discovering my drives incorrectly or repeatedly discovering them.

What ended up working:

Removing all drives except the 160
Ran the DVD and "let the thingy do its thingy" -install on entire disk ***
Got it up and running, completed AV wizard etc
Power down
Plug in 3 additional drives and boot live using ubuntu 12.04 disk
formatted each drive as xfs (did nothing to mount or ownership)
powered up
Allowed lmce to detect my drives and use its file structure (mb free displayed correctly)


I have rebooted several times now and everything seems to be stable.  Are either of you suggesting I take the system back down and use a different scheme?  I am not that far into this setup to start over and do it how you two would.



*** edit to clarify that it selected its own formatting, etx4 ***

[l3mce]

Nope... that was what I was recommending you do.

Now feel free to get it how you like it, clone it... and proceed to breaking stuff!!