Smart Home Blog

After mobile Orbiter based on Java was announced I thought that Symbian Orbiter was dead. JavaMO works fine and it doesn’t need specific platform. The mobile phone just should support Java applications. There are some issues with JavaMO, but it looks much better then S60 Orbiter.

But I was wrong. Thanks to Hari, who started JavaMO development, owners of S60 v.3 smartphones can run native Orbiter on their devices. The updated version of Symbian mobile Orbiter can be downloaded here, demo video - here. Feel free to install it, test and submit found bugs and suggestions here.

UPDATE: There is the newest version of the S60 v3 Orbiter. You can find it here. The changes include hardcoded resolution to 240×320, used by many smartphones, local cache for the screens and some bugfixes.

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Convergent Home Technologies based in England announced its new home automation system Dianemo. The Dianemo is based on the opensource smarthome system LinuxMCE with well tested hardware and some customizations. There is a few demo videos on the web site demonstrated all Dianemo features.

The Convergent Home Technologies engineers help a lot to grow up LinuxMCE. Full featured VDR integration, KNX/EIB interface, participation with new Z-Wave interface, sharing experience with hardware - all of this come from the Convergent Home Technologies. As result the LinuxMCE users can use that stuff for free.

I wish good like to Convergent Home Technologies with its Dianemo. Hope its customers will be happy with the system!

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LinuxMCE development team has announced the release cycle. It’ll be 12 months starting from the version 0810. Peer Oliver Schmidt (”Possy”) will take up the role of release wrangler to try to keep developers on schedule and Zaerc is taking over the role of keeping the development build in good shape on a day-to-day basis.

LinuxMCE lost the servers and hosting that PlutoHome, Inc. had been providing for it the early part of this year. So, the big work was done to move the build servers, svn (back to the old charonmedia svn machine), forum, wiki and main website to the new location. But in spite of this the 0810-alpha0 is available for installation and testing. Good job!

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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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LinuxMCE development team decided to pass version 0804 and release 0810 to synchronize with Kubuntu releases. A few days ago was announced a 0810-alpha0. It can be installed on the Kubuntu 8.10 using installation script. That approach is good if you already setup Kubuntu Intrepid and fast Internet connection.

The brief instructions show to install 0810-alpha0 can be found in the wiki. You can ask help or post bug-report on that topic on the LinuxMCE forum.

I already installed LinuxMCE 0810-alpha0 on the VMWare to play a bit. The installation passed fine from the first try. I didn’t have a time to play with it. Will do it tomorrow.

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