Uninstall?

[fatcake]

So I tried booting from a cd only to find that the install failed and then mce destroyed my network settings. My wireless card was working find and now doesnt work. Booting up ubuntu is also messed up and takes a while. Can someone tell me how to get rid of all the mce files since it never really installed, and how to get my wireless settings back to normal?

[arbrandes]

I'm as much a LMCE noob as anyone here, but from what I've seen of the scripts, it is highly unlikely that an uninstallation is possible.  I have a few suggestions for the Powers That Be that relate to this, which I'll get to in a moment.

The way the installer is built, it basically takes over the system, making it impossible (or at least undesirable) to have LinuxMCE installed on a regular workstation.  It just breaks too many things, aside from the fact that it breaks LinuxMCE in itself (I've been trying to get this working for several hours, with no luck, and I'm no Linux or Ubuntu noob).

So how about two additional methods of distribution?

1) Make a LinuxMCE LiveCD.  You won't have to bother with an installer (or uninstaller), since everything will just be pre-installed on the CD.  I don't know how challenging that would be to make, but it would sure be easier on the end-users, especially your target audience which is not necessarity techno-savvy who just wants to see live those wonderful features shown on the video.

2) Every single piece of good software I know of has first been adopted by geeks, and the geeks then sell it to the "normal people".  So why not document and distribute the tools to an entirely manual installation, where the user can have control over when and how they will break their system?  As it is, the current installer breaks MANY things on an otherwise unchanged Ubuntu 6.10 desktop install.

Don't get me wrong, I still think LinuxMCE is going to be one of the more important open-source projects, right up there with Asterisk and MythTV.  But the fact remains that in my experience it was easier to install MythTV from source (and with a good Howto) than LinuxMCE with a fully automated (and broken) installer.

At the very least, at this point in development I think it should be advertised in bold red letters that one should NOT try to install LinuxMCE on one's everyday-use Ubuntu 6.10 workstation or desktop, as it is not at all a set of well-behaved packages.

And now, I'm off to format my HD and reinstall Ubuntu...

[webpaul1]

Very good points.  Remember LMCE was forked from Pluto, which ONLY ran on dedicated hardware and their distro.  Getting lmce to 'play nice' and stop taking over the conf files, and allow uninstallation, etc., is a work in progress.  Note on the wikis, *that* is my goal with lmce; that it be a 'normal' well behaved app that runs on ubuntu like any other, and can be included safely with the main ubuntu distro for mainstream use.  I admit at the moment, it's still too invasive.

Regarding the 2nd point, I'm still working on the docs and the source installer.  Give me a couple days to get it all online.  LMCE is a much bigger beast to compile than myth, that's why I'm trying to provide scripts to automate the build process.

[bawbag31]

I agree with arbrandes, this project is gonna rock.  I really appriciate the amount of hard work that must have gone into this project.  I've been waiting for a decent stable media centre solution for linux ever since I built my media PC and tried Windows MCE.  But I have to ask ... does the project really deserve its 1.0 designation?  Does it 'just work' out-of-the-box? And is it really stable? Maybe for pre-built boxes, but not for everyone else.  I feel that many noobs will have been misled by these claims into messing up their lovely ubuntu installation beyond repair.
I realise that the scale of the project is completely different, but beryl is only at 0.2 and many linux users use it everyday and it comes bundled with many distributions.
Anyway, sorry for the rant, and keep up the good work.  This project will make me very happy one day - and make my girlfriend despair!

[webpaul1]

Regarding the 1.0 designation... That's debatable.  It *does* run solid and ready for prime time if (and only if) you use a narrow set of hardware on a dedicated box.  Since it's possible to make it very stable, is that enough for 1.0???  Don't know.

What I do admit I really messed up on was forgetting to put a bold warning in the installation part that tells everyone that there's still a bunch of pluto scripts in there that "take over" and change conf files, and it's safest to install on a dedicated partition.  That I'm really sorry about, but I put it up there a few days after the release.