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LinuxTag, Europe’s leading exhibition on Linux and Open Source took place from May 28 - 31, 2008 at Berlin’s Messezentrum unter dem Funkturm. LinuxMCE community participated in that major event. KR, Zaerc, Hari, DanielK22, Posde, ddamron and TSCHAK showed mostly full range of devices supported by LinxuMCE: Z-Wave adapter and modules, IP phones and cameras, different kinds of Orbiters - Nokia Internet Tablet, JavaMO, Symbian MO and Windows XP, and remote controls. That exhibition installation can be used as a start for newbies who want to have home automation system with rich functionality and open code in their houses. That wiki page contains a bunch of nice shots which shows LinuxMCE in action. Also that PDF presentation might be interesting for all who’d like to know what is LinuxMCE and its basic functions (thanks to Daniel).

My congratulations to LinuxMCE exhibition team, all developers and community (I’m also a part of LinxuMCE community :)). We’re making amazing product!

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Finally I gathered oneself up to upgrade my LinuxMCE 0710 Beta 4 up to the latest stable version. The point to do that was VDR 1.6.0. It’s much better then 1.4.7. Especially because it supports UTF-8. So, Russian EPG is displayed now correctly on the on-screen menu. Another small but useful improvement in the integration with VDR is showing information about the currently played channel on the Orbiter.

The upgrade was performed perfectly. All my data and preferences were saved and transferred to the new system. I just installed a few packages such lcdproc and vdradmin-am. Next to build and configure stream-server and CI + CAM.

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Today I found this discussion on the LinuxMCE developer forum about a search of light alternative for Ruby. Ruby is used to implement the custom logic of new devices added in the system. It’s called Generic Serial Device or GSD. Ruby is good for that purpose except it’s heavy a bit. So, the idea is to find something lighter but with the same embedded properties to provide basic home automation control and a/v control on a very cheap platform.

The Lua seems a good option. It’s simple, easy embedded and light. So, most probably it’ll chosen by LinuxMCE developers. Because there are more positive responses so far.

I developed an interface on Ruby between custom controller, based on ICPDAS, and LinuxMCE. I like Ruby because it looks like Perl. And I didn’t spend a lot of time to learn it. Haven’t seen any row of code by Lua yet. But if it’ll replace Ruby in GSD will port the interface to the new language. Or maybe Ruby and Lua will be available in GSD both. In any case will see.

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Yesterday the final version of LinuxMCE 0710 was released. Basically, it’s exactly the same as RC1 except just two thing. The first one is adding a few packages into debian cach to speedup installation. And the second one is updated version of ZWave interface. So, if you have installed RC1 there is no reason to upgrade it.

I have to find time to upgrade my 0710 Beta 4 and play with VDR 1.6. And waiting for the first version of 0804.

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As many of you may know Kubuntu 8.04 was released at 24/04/08. So, LinuxMCE developers started thinking about 0804 version. You can find a list of goals for LinuxMCE 0804 here. Some interesting ideas are: adding JavaMO and MAME, improving Z-Wave, MythTV and INSTEON integration, allowing to create a custom themes for Orbiter.

Personally, I’m very interested to have a better VDR integration. The RC1 already contains the latest stable VDR version (1.6.0). Thanks to that I’ll able to see Russian EPG and play with SoftCAM. But to use VDR with more than one media director the proper integration should be done. I understand the problem with VDR. Unlike MythTV it doesn’t have a strict client-server architecture. So, this is a main difficulty with providing a full-featured functionality for media director. But I’m sure that LinuxMCE developers will find a way to implement that. Hope it’ll be in the 0804 release.

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