Hi,
Anyone played with it yet? KM it is not but it is still interesting imho.
Mike

wow... the gyro remote looks amazing.

I installed LinuxMCE, MythBuntu, and MythDora yesterday. Of the three, MythDora was the furthest along. LinuxMCE has some advanced installer GUIs (at one point, a Russian woman appears in an embedded video and talks you though things), but it supports a very narrow set of tuner/capture hardware. Once installed, the famous menu was very slow and unresponsive, and it froze up on me. It seemed that I could get it to do nothing, and since I was never prompted for a password (or allowed to name the box) I was unable to log in and poke around. I spent no time reading documentation to solve these problems, so they may be one FAQ entry away from a solution.

I may do a full writeup, but basically, KnoppMyth's installation process is not pretty, yet it is so much faster to install than any of those other distros and only asks you what it can't figure out on its own. When you're done, you have an easy-to-use MythTV appliance. The other distros were, for the most part, pretty to look at, but they had nearly no automation, often did not work properly with mainstream hardware, and were very slow to install.

As a KnoppMyth contributor, I may be biased, so if you have a free hour, try installing LinuxMCE (yes, it may take that long, vs 13 minutes for KnoppMyth). You can try the MythBuntu alpha in less time (be forewarned: the nVidia driver installation process failed horribly, and apt-get did nothing to fix it) or MythDora 4.

Without giving too much away, let me also say that the "prettiness" factor is being addressed in KnoppMyth. I'm not personally involved in that aspect, but I've seen some proof-of-concept work, and I think it's a clever way to [buzzword]leverage[/buzzword] existing GUI infrastructure and not re-invent the wheel.

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Maybe I'm just showing my age, but I actually kinda like KM's "proto-gui" installer. It does what it needs to and gets the job done. And honestly, who really gives a rat's @$$ what the installer looks like once the system is up and running. (which absolutely happens much faster in KM)

Hi,

I can see by the responsesa few have looked at it or at least the video. I looked at it because of mythtv and that part left me ready to reboot back into KM

For those who haven't looked at it, there are two ways to install it.
DVD
or
One cd and two iso files.

A friend pulled the dvd version and after a very long download, had to re download as it failed just before the end. He said it took less than 30 minutes to install and gave me copy. I, however was not able to get an install from the dvd. Probably bad alinement between our drives.

Undaunted I pulled a kubuntu 7.04 desktop iso and installed that way. It took a couple of hours as you first install kubuntu then if you have the iso files for mce you can install. If you burn the iso's to cd (2) then you have to swap cds a couple of times. The setup wizard s kind of neat with step by step guidance. It is selectively available later to change your system but in a KM world, would not be of any real benefit.

Trying to setup mythtv was not easy as I didn't read the directions,to find where things were hidden. I found the setup screens in the KDE desktop menus in two different locations, but I was not able to obtain any output from my 350 card. It did not offer the extra features of KM.

Someday I will go back and retry with more vigor but for now KM serves me and does it quite well. I am not sure if I really want my tv to "follow me" around the house anyway but is an interesting concept. There were some clever ideas and the background of constantly changing slide show should prevent screen burn. The dev folks do deserve a lot of credit for their work and if they ever add a full KM will probably have a barn burning package!

Just my humble opinions
Mike

yes i agree. prettiness is nice, but it doesnt really do anything. one of the things in the demo video that pricked my ears, was the ability to select the resolution you like.. im not sure if this would finish the need to edit xorg.conf though.

To me, modelines are fairly daunting. windows video drivers do that kind of thing through a gui. im dreaming of a world where the native resolution of my display, and hsinc and vsinc can be auto-detected. or i can just choose from a drop down list like i do with windows. my tv out via windows is better than my mythbox.. and i put that down to me not having the perfect xorg.conf .. i also see lots of missinformation regarding tv out conf.

km has this forum.. which is a fairly significant plus

Prettiness doesn't provide function, true, but some people use it as a false indicator of overall software maturity and capability. In any case, as I said, there are plans to address it.

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I played around with LinuxMCE on my "spare" box which consists of a Celeron 600 and 256mb ram in an intel mb (not sure of the model, but it runs whatever I throw at it). I also had a hard time with it where the menu system locked up. I was using an ATI Remote Wonder so maybe it wasn't fully compatible with that remote.

I'm all for KM, the installer may not be all that pretty, but honestly you don't need to do much administration in the not pretty parts anyway. Mythweb handles all of the scheduling stuff, and webmin handles the other stuff. Too many people are putting too much emphasis on a pretty installer and eye candy in the non-essential aspects of an entertainment hub.

Well it may have been incompatible with my keyboard and mouse, too, then

Unfortunately, this just seems to be human nature. People are more likely to forgive flaws in something if it's pretty, and less likely to see the merits of something if it's not.

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Human:The philosopher.

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Hi,

bet it wasn't very quick in it's operations? Now add another 128 of mem, install KM with a 350 card and you have got yourself a "real" pvr Now we just need a menu choice to turn on the lights.....

There are some interesting ideas and those folks have put in a lot of work to bring it to the current level (compared to early versions of pluto) but I don't think it is really intended to be a pvr. I would expect to see someone figuring out how to have it use KM as a remote device for media as KM does that very well.

Mike

It's actually going into service as a slave backend soon. I just sold my other computers (Craigs List is great) and I'm upgrading to either one of those lx8100's or one of the slim line Dell machines. In either case, those won't hold too many cards so the Celeron 600 will get the PVR-500 and probably two Air2PC rev 0.2's and just dump data to disk.

Very true, I guess we should ask Miss Teen South Carolina for the answer to this one

A co-worker showed me the YouTube video of that yesterday...Man, I could not make any sense of what she was talking about...

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