Smart Home Blog

I left the LinuxMCE core/hybrid and didn’t assemble the new one yet. So, I use my laptop or old desktop to watch movies. With desktop is everything fine. It run Kubuntu 0804 and I installed there Boxee - nice looking, social media center software. But there is Fedora 9 on my laptop and Boxee doesn’t offer binaries for it. There is an only one way to install Boxee from the source.

I found nice tutorial which explains how to install XBMC on Fedora 9. Since Boxee is based on XBMC I tried to use it to build Boxee. But without luck. By some reason the xbmc.bin wasn’t created.

Then I tried to build XBMC using recommendations from that tutorial. Finally I did it. XBMC is run under Fedora 9 without any problems. Will try to build Boxee again as well. Maybe the second time will be successful.

UPDATE: Finally I built Boxee under Fedora 10 (for 9 should be the same). The trick is that. Instead of running make install after make finishes the script make-boxee.sh should be run. I didn’t adjust it for Fedora 10 and it gave me a lot of warnings. But as result I was able run Boxee successfully.

UPDATE2: There is a problem with Boxee under Fedora 10. Instead of playback I see the fast-forward. Also Boxee crashes with Segmentation Fault very often. Will try to build with the fresh sources tonight.

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New Linux-based commercial media center is gonna be ship in August. The Cirgon supports 1080i HD resolution and offers 320GB, 500GB, and 750GB hard drive options together with controls management and playback of music, photos, and video. The full spec of HTPC is available here. The price is starting at $2000.

Personally I’m happy to see another commercial product which uses Linux as operation system (Fedora in case of Cirgon). But as I see that HTPC misses a few important features. First of all, Cirgon is designed for HDTV. But it offers DVI output and not HDMI. Also the HTPC equiped by 10/100 Base-T Ethernet while Gigabit LAN is a standard de-facto now. And the last but important missed feature is PVR. This means that Cirgon cannot play, record and paused LiveTV. Taking into account the price Cirgon and missed features in my opinion it might be more reasonable to buy Popcorn Hour instead of it or build your own box based on VDR or MythTV.

In any case, it’s good tendency that producers started to use Linux for their commercial media centers.

[via LinuxDevices]

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Once I already blogged about Ubuntu Home Server. Now it’s time to announce another one - Amahi. Amahi is based on Fedora 8 and offers hard drive disk space monitoring, a private wiki, network PC drive backups and file sharing, Vista calendar / iCal / Outlook integration, a custom web browser search extension for IE and Firefox (very cool), plugin extension support (currently available: browser-based photo slideshow, food recipe recorder, BitTorrent downloader), print server, dynamic DNS configuration for remote access, and simple network setup.

I hope that Amahi can make a live of home users who have more then one PC. But it might be a good idea to add more entertainment stuff such UPnP media server or SlimServer. In any case Amahi is just in beta stage. So, it has a time for improvements.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

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MythDora 3.1 - based on Fedora Core 5 distribution included the latest MythTV is released.Changes include:

• Turned off mythbackend at boot time
• X now restarts after the setup menu and allows Nvidia module to be probed
• Created workaround for network connection during setup
• Updated to MythTV-0.20-147
• Redid saa7134 capture card setup
• Added in newer k9copy package
• Readded Imon remote control
• Split MySQL mythtvsetup commands into two files
• Added the pcHDTV 5500 to setup menu
• Removed stale release notes with new ones
• Added in powersave program with dependencies

You can Download the ISO, read MythDora Installation HOWTO or see screencast.

[via MythPVR]

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