It’s pretty simple to have media center and lighting control in one box. Just install LinuxMCE… But if you already use MythTV and not going to break everything you may be interested in that thread. There is a simple explanation howto integrate X10 and MythTV using Perl scripts (MythX10 (240)) and flexibility of MythTV. I suspect this or similar approach is used on that video.
[via MythTV News]
|
|
There is a set of two books: Linux Toys and Linux Toys II which offers a geek way to computerize your home. Both books describe a few open source projects which can be used by home users for some purposes: automation, entertainment, hosting for data, movies, pictures etc.
From the first part of the Linux Toys I’d like to emphasize (in respect to smarthome) Music Jukebox, Temperature Monitor and Home Video Archive projects. But note that there are many newer and better open source applications to do the same things (the boos was published at 2003).
Since Linux Toys II is newer then Linux Toys (November 2005) it contains a few interesting modern projects such MythTV and Icecast. It might be useful to read a chapter 7 - “Automating Home Lights and Gadgets with X10″ for automation fans. The rest projects are related with smarthome but not so strongly as I’d like.
Anyway, for me those books were useful to give some ideas and hardware supported by Linux. You can get all information directly from the open source projects used there. And those information will be fresh. For example, I found DigiTemp software and a bunch of 1-wire and iButton hardware to build weather station based on Linux in the Linux Toys. There is a simple example which can be extended into profession solution.
Here is a list of devices which don’t have open source drivers for Linux. Devices provided proprietary drivers are also included there. That list is used by Linux Driver Project group to develop and add to the kernel drivers for those devices. Feel free to add your device if it isn’t supported by Linux and you isn’t listed in that list.
It’ll be useful to check that list at stage when you’re planning to build media center of other type PC which will be based on Linux. Hope that list won’t be increased 
UK TV integrator DaweVision Ltd has announced its new product - BabelTV. Basically, BabelTV is full featured PC but pre-configured to be used in the home entertainment area. It’s based on Xubuntu Linux and provides:
As you may see from the BabelTV specification below it can replace not only DVD player and satellite receiver but your home PC also. Because it includes everything you need (except games probably).
The demo video of BabelTV is available here.
Pepper Computer, Inc. - producer Linux-bases UMPC PepperPad (its hardware part is given to the other company now) is not dead! The company faced with finance problems. So, there is a big changes in that company. The most important is an open sources of Pepper Linux IMHO (PepperPad uses that OS). It’s good. Especially after an amazing popularity of Nokia’s Internet Table Family: 770, N800 and coming N810. Hope that open source Pepper Linux will involve a lot of fans to produce a deserve competitor to Windows-based Origami UMPC.