Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Phillips Pronto Remotes (on Linux!)

Some of you may know about my little project at home which will ultimately mean that that I have a Linn Knekt multiroom sound system, Comfort Alarm system (with home automation stuff) and multiple Pronto remotes.

I recently purchased 5 Prontos from eBay (one for each family member) and now need to program them but have found ProntoEdit to be a PITA to work with... plus it doesn't work on Linux :-(

I have found a project called Tonto (see
http://giantlaser.com/tonto/ ) which is written in Java. I haven't fully tested this yet but it does look promising and is supposedly more intuitive. I will update soon on this!

What I will say is how to run the bloody thing in Ubuntu because that was a bugger to set up!


First you need the latest JRE...
apt-get install sun-java6-jre

You then need to extract tonto to /usr/share and edit the tonto.sh file to point to the jre...
JHOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre"

Then make the tonto.sh file executable...
chmod +x tonto.sh

Then simply run tonto.sh and the job should be a good 'un ;-)

Monday, September 10, 2007

More on LinuxMCE

Since my recent foray into attempting to set up LinuxMCE I have purchased a second-hand Hauppage HVR-1100 tuner. This has much better support in Linux! It should be noted that IMHO the picture quality on the GDI BlackGold cards is far better and less affected by poor signal quality.

The only difficulty I had was that I had to recompile the Video4Linux DVB drivers - I believe that this is an Ubuntu problem but it isn't exactly hard to do ;-)

Anyway, I re-installed LinuxMCE and it works quite well... I'm undecided whether to switch back to vanilla Linux with MythTV or not though - I'm not using LinuxMCE to its full potential and I haven't got time to investigate more at the moment.