Revision as of 16:00, 25 January 2009

Reason for this page

This page describes my journey into LinuxMCE as a newbie. I did not have a lot of linux knowledge but really wanted to have a single system for all my media, recording. I saw the video on You Tube on the functions of LinuxMCE and was sold. I can not only do the media features, I also want to explore some of the other options in the future. I am writing this wiki as a give back to the community of LinuxMCE who has helped me to become more familiar with Linux and MCE. I hope this will help other new users with ideas or a kind of menu on things they want to do with MCE. It also links a lot of the Wiki pages and forum threads that helped me implement some of the functionality. Sometimes I found it hard to find the correct wiki pages to answer my questions. The forum was then my main source for information. A big thanks for everyone who tried to point me in the right direction or answered my questions.

Please feel free to comment on this effort or give additional ideas. I will open a thread on the user forum to do so. Offcourse I will provide the link to the tread ones I start it.

At the end I added a TO DO list of things that I still want to accomplish or solve. If you want to help please do so. Send me a message or add a link to a page that you think is benefitial

My current setup:

• Case: still have to buy a nice HTPC case still using a normal desktop
• Motherboard: ASUS A7V8X
• Graphic adapter: ASUS V8420 De luxe
• Screen: Philips matchline widescreen 100 HZ screen 82 inches connected with S-VHS
• Sound card: Onboard currently only using two channels (stereo)
• Orbiters: XP laptop, PDA HP Ipaq 2210

Done so far

Installation:

Installed Orbiter on PDA and Windows XP Laptop:

Installing the orbiter software on the PDA and Windows XP is well described on the wiki. Be sure to choose the 3:4 screen setup for the PDA to get the orbiter on full screen on your PDA.

Changed ripping formats for CD:

All my music I have in MP3 format 320 Kb. I changed the standard ripping format to refelct this using the LinuxMCE wiki.

Set screensaver to use my own pictures:

I did not wanted the screensaver to show the FLICKR pictures but pictures from my own collection on the media center. The proces for doing this is described on the wiki. As it is a long explanation I will quicky write down my procedure.

Switch off automatic update media daemon:

Switching off the automatic media update daemon is not a best practise but I did this because it looked like it was taking a lot of CPU power from my system. I found out that this is not true. See this user [1] tread to see why I think it happend as also others found this happening at their system. If you switch off the daemon you will need to sync manually when you add media to your system. For me presonally this is not an issue because I am using a small system now. Maybe this is not a good idea to do for most people.

Formatted an additional drive:

I added an USB drive to my configuration as the disk in my system was not big enough to hold my media. As I am still in a testing stage I have enough capacity with an external USB disk of 320 GB. I have a Freecom USB disk that is power by USB. It has a 2,5 inch laptop disk and is extreme quiet. As it came with a windows partition I decided later to format it. This resulted in a issue that it was not recoqnised again. There is a procedure to clear the PnpQueue on the wiki that solved this issue.

Media:

TO DO