Comments on: IBM TP LMC

By: mike18 uxhw

mike18 uxhw — Wed, 09 May 2007 07:47:55 +0000

She has just recovered from severe illness dot In the winter you
mike18 movie*
careful sorrowing he seeth in his sons bower the winehall

By: Graham White

Graham White — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 08:20:15 +0000

I have the remote control working well. I have set up 2 of these now (one for a friend), and while it’s nothing particularly new, it’s still quite interesting and there aren’t that many of them out there yet!

By: Christian Roser

Christian Roser — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 07:56:44 +0000

Hi Graham, I did exactly the same project a while ago with an IBM Thinkpad X24 (subnotebook) running on a xubuntu with a fluxbox, autologin and autostarting amarok (fetching mp3’s/ogg through a wireless network from my nas - my wife doesn’t like cat5 cables in the livingroom). The only thing still missing is a working remote control (currently a logitech Harmony 885). I will return and put a comment as soon as I got it (the remote) to work.
Sorry for my broken english

Best regard from Germany
Chris

By: eightbar » Blog Archive » Ricetta: Media PC alla Linux

eightbar » Blog Archive » Ricetta: Media PC alla Linux — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 10:07:03 +0000

[...] I thought autologin would be useful too. This will help with (see my previous post) wife acceptance factor number 2 - it has to be easy to use. The less confusing and time taken to boot into the GUI the better. So, I do what everybody would do, and completely forget Redhat screw around with the KDE display manager and use the KDE control center to set autologin - of course, it doesn’t work! Some head scrating out of the way and I remember I’m actually using GDM so fire up gdmsetup and configure up the autologin easily for my mediapc user. [...]

By: Graham White

Graham White — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 07:19:48 +0000

Ah yes, I had considered using a phone with either bluetooth or perhaps wifi but neither option suit me (or my phone) very well though.

All I have used is Linux, LIRC and Amarok on a thinkpad, nothing else aside from the remote control are required. This is all very well for a proof of concept, but IRDA ports are short range so my remote only works from 3-4 feet away from the laptop so stage 2 will be using a proper IR receiver instead.

If you think about it, and what I really like about this idea, is that a Thinkpad is perfect for media centre use, even more so if it had a long range IR receiver built in. There is an s-video port to connect to the TV as well as a seperate screen for those times when someone else is watching TV while you’re playing music, they certainly have enough power these days, small, quiet, and if you need more storage that can be hooked up to your network too.

If/when I build a system to put this into production use at home I will need to think about how I can control it when my wife is watching another TV channel, make sure the graphics card has TV out, build a quiet PC, attach to the network, and make sure it’s not too big and ugly for living room usage. Actually, why would I do that again, maybe I’ll stick with a thinkpad! Who knows?

By: AndyP

AndyP — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 15:31:25 +0000

Interesting… so you’ve not installed any kind of media centre software? Just a simple MP3 / video player? Keep meaning to build myself a Linux-based PVR and entertainment box.

By: georgio_1999

georgio_1999 — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 14:43:51 +0000

Cool project! I’ve just done something similar but opted for the bluetooth route as my phone and computer have the appropriate hardware. The project is called bemused (http://bemused.sourceforge.net/) although I used a Java port as my phone isn’t based on the symbian OS (at http://elektron.its.tudelft.nl/~jkohne76/). It plugs into amarok out of the box if you install kde bluetooth. Now I can be anywhere in the house and change the song :)