Just completed my first install, and WOW am I impressed...

[indulis]

Thom,

This thread shows that a strict appliance approach keeps coming up as a roadblock for many people, not just me.

LMCE for normal users is still too tech despite the appliance approach (I am excluding packaged solutions from the likes of Andrew's company) .  And for power users/hackers it is often frustrating because the appliance approach actively fights attempts to get systems working well.

I think it is a great aim to have LMCE as appliance like as possible, but it just does not seem to be working for quite a few people and their hardware and device setups. 

I found that my display was not detected and set up correctly (too high a freq) and when I changed xorg.conf manually to a working one, that LMCE kept "fixing it" back to a non-working one.  In the end I've had to hack some of the LMCE scripts to stop LMCE changing my xorg.conf all the time.

I've found LMCE doing the same for Mythtv- I've set up cron job for Mythfilldatabase for the Australian "shepherd" XMLTV grabber, as this is the shepherd recommendation, and also because the normal mythfilldatabase job just loops saying it is is "waiting 120 seconds before starting".  I am trying to track down why this is happening right now.  Anyway every time LMCE restarts it reenables the Mythtv fillldatabase job inside Mythtv.  Which I don't want.

Anyway, it is fact that LMCE doesn't get it right all the time.  The proof is in these forums, with so many people fighting LMCE to get their systems to stay working.  You can't even fix it yourself, because LMCE thinks it knows better and backs out your changes.

OK so what could we do to fix it-  perhaps there need to be some flags (files, env variables) which could be set to tell LMCE to back off because the user wants to override the default behaviour.  One for each major area that gets "fixed" by LMCE.

Or have a global setting to stop "unfixing" of configuration files and settings.  So, once LMCE has run the first time, it won't touch the settings again, unless asked to do so again explicitly.

Is this an unreasonable request or approach?

[tschak909]

no, the right way is to fix the automated bits so that they generate the right values, INSTEAD OF LOBOTOMIZING IT.

I will not back down from this. It needs to be fixed correctly for the near and long term.

-Thom

p.s. do keep in mind that people often post to the forums because they're having a problem, not because things are working well. It tends to skew results.

-Thom

[caddywhompus]

OK so what could we do to fix it-  perhaps there need to be some flags (files, env variables) which could be set to tell LMCE to back off because the user wants to override the default behaviour.  One for each major area that gets "fixed" by LMCE.

Or have a global setting to stop "unfixing" of configuration files and settings.  So, once LMCE has run the first time, it won't touch the settings again, unless asked to do so again explicitly.

Is this an unreasonable request or approach?

It sounded very reasonable to me.  I don't actually see how these suggestions are in conflict of the appliance approach.  The system still auto-configures very well, and most things are setup right.  Adding the ability to tweak important settings for power users doesn't not negate that.  And if the settings can be changed from the Core, and pushed out to the MDs, then the appliance model is likewise preserved.

[tschak909]

and what about when things get upgraded?

come on guys, think..

you're wasting time hand-tweaking things, when we could work together to make the AVWizard program code, and things like the mythTV plugin code more intelligent to handle these things.

STOP THINKING SHORT TERM.

-Thom

[tschak909]

*hmm*

But if you REALLY want it for now...

go to the web admin
go to advanced > software > boot settings

select the CORE

then find fixMythTvSettings.sh in the list, uncheck it.

done.

[indulis]

Thanks Thom, that is v useful.

Long term view is definitely the right one, but if I can't even get LMCE to work, how am I ever going to get the experience to be able to help improve things.  If xorg.conf keeps getting clobbered and I can't fix it, how long will LMCE stay on my machine?  If I had not worked out how to get around the xorg.conf clobbering (and many users would not get this far) then I would have gone back to running Mythtv instead.

Problem summary:
1) LMCE does not get it 100% right all the time
2) Therefore user needs to manually fix it
3) LMCE then clobbers the fix

If we can remove step 3 *then* we can get to step 4
4) include the manual changes into main LMCE code

[tschak909]

Ok.

-Thom

[caddywhompus]

and what about when things get upgraded?

come on guys, think..

you're wasting time hand-tweaking things, when we could work together to make the AVWizard program code, and things like the mythTV plugin code more intelligent to handle these things.

STOP THINKING SHORT TERM.

-Thom

OK, you make a point.  I think the long term goal should be to have more automation and auto-detection that eliminates the customization.  I applaud the direction you are taking.

BUT, for now I would like to continue using the system and even start contributing to the refinement of future releases.  To do that we need to be able to tweak a few things, even if manually, so the system works well enough to place in a live environment.  It would be hard to get my buddies fired-up about LinuxMCE if they came over and saw the poor quality TV that is currently defaulting to my Living Room.

[tschak909]

Then you may want to try the fix I suggested above.

-Thom

[caddywhompus]

Thank You, I'll give it a try.

I look forward to contributing in the future as best I can.

-Jim

[hari]

This thread shows that a strict appliance approach keeps coming up as a roadblock for many people, not just me.

LMCE for normal users is still too tech despite the appliance approach (I am excluding packaged solutions from the likes of Andrew's company) .  And for power users/hackers it is often frustrating because the appliance approach actively fights attempts to get systems working well.

It is not the system fighting you, more the other way round. E.g. many people think "I know how to mount a drive on linux", ignore autofs, do manual mounts anywhere and wonder why things don't work. I understand that it is harder to figure out how a complex system works. Sometimes it is harder to modify existing things than to start from scratch. But this system is too complex for a non-appliance approach at the moment. Until we have the final ultimate install and configuration wizard that can handle packages, different distributions and whatnot, we have to focus on getting a complete solution delivered. And the only way the developers see for now (and nobody showed a better approach) is in the form of an appliance.
Enjoy the luxury, the system does so many things automatically. Of course I can manually setup my Cisco 7970 with asterisk and whatnot. But why? I have to cope with computer problems at work. At home I want an appliance that works. This is the ultimate goal of the core development team.

I found that my display was not detected and set up correctly (too high a freq) and when I changed xorg.conf manually to a working one, that LMCE kept "fixing it" back to a non-working one.  In the end I've had to hack some of the LMCE scripts to stop LMCE changing my xorg.conf all the time.

This is getting better with each Xorg release, some setups can even run without xorg.conf. So, should we just deactivate the automatic X setup and everybody handcrafts his own files in the future? That can't be the solution. We better fix the setup routines.

Anyway, it is fact that LMCE doesn't get it right all the time.  The proof is in these forums, with so many people fighting LMCE to get their systems to stay working.  You can't even fix it yourself, because LMCE thinks it knows better and backs out your changes.

OK so what could we do to fix it-  perhaps there need to be some flags (files, env variables) which could be set to tell LMCE to back off because the user wants to override the default behaviour.  One for each major area that gets "fixed" by LMCE.

Or have a global setting to stop "unfixing" of configuration files and settings.  So, once LMCE has run the first time, it won't touch the settings again, unless asked to do so again explicitly.

Is this an unreasonable request or approach?

If you are skilled enough to tweak an X11 configuration, where is the problem with putting an exit line in a script? This is also documented.

best regards,
Hari

[colinjones]

Further to Indulis/Hari's comments...

Indulis - I'm not sure what is triggering it to overwrite your changes - I make changes every time I install and occasionally at other times and they never get overwritten. Normally, this only happens when the AV Wizard runs, however in the dim distant past I remember this happening to me once or twice and I have read of others having the same problem.

I am really curious as to what triggers this behaviour because hacking the scripts obviously isn't the right approach. If we understood what caused it, we could almost certainly find what it is that I am doing/not doing that means it doesn't effect me. I think generally, when that process is triggered it copies over the xorg.conf.pluto.avwizard file and others in the past have used the workaround of editing that file to be the same as their xorg.conf file - however I note I do not do that, I just edit the xorg.conf file and it stays edited!

Col.

[hari]

colin, read the last posts again. This is not about xorg.conf being overwritten with the "exit" fix in place.
The right approach is to fix the setup tool.

br Hari

[colinjones]

hari, no, I understand that the exit fix stops this behaviour - what I'm curious about is why mine xorg.conf doesn't get overwritten even without the exit fix? What triggers the overwriting?

[indulis]

I don't know what the trigger is. I suspect that it is to do with mod time on the file, as I could not just change the output file in the Xconfigure script to be a file other than /etc/X11/xorg.conf, when I tried that it just kept going in to AVwizard reconfiguration at each reboot.

But on my system even the AVwizard would stuff up the X setup halfway through customisation, such that I could not see what was going on.  The screen would go a purple-black , with the top half visible, fading down to black at the bottom half of the screen.  Think it was because the refresh rate was too high, if I look at the xorg.conf file it was using the freq range for vert refresh ( going from memory here) was far too high.  No problem on most LCD displays, as they just "downscale" the signal to 60Hz anyway- my work one gives a warning that "refresh rate is out of range" but displays the picture anyway!  On a CRT it is more serious, as they don't really cope as well.

Should I submit a patch so that the default xorg.conf refresh rate is sane?  How?

Is there any reason why I can't start changing the scripts so that they respect a global variable (say LMCE_APPLIANCE_MODE), which if set causes the scripts to not overwrite changes?  Or should we have a more granular approach where each script would be aware of its own setting (e.g. LMCE_MYTHTV_CORE_STOP_RECONFIGURE=1), or both, scripts obey both a global and a per-script setting.

I am reluctant to even start to change anything due to the warnings by developers, so would want some buy-in on an approach to making LMCE "hacker friendly", without compromising the aim to keep it an "appliance" for most users.

Us tinkerers would like to be able to tinker, tune, and help make LMCE better.  Telling LMCE "hands off!" would help in the case of misbehaving hardware and/or misbehaving LMCE and would also help make the process of debugging problems much simpler.