My usage of LINK so far

[kratib]

Hello,

Just wanted to share with you my usage of this device so far. I'm using it as a computer connected to the TV and the Internet, so I don't expect a  non-techie-friendly experience at this point, just a geeky entertainment device.

UNINSTALLING UNNEEDED SOFTWARE

* First thing I did was uninstall MythTV and MySQL. I've worked with MythTV extensively in the past as a developer and I don't want to repeat the experience of either using it or developing for it :-) Besides, the Neuros MythTV plugin just opens Firefox so I might as well open it myself!

* I also uninstalled Evolution and OpenOffice, because hey - I won't do office work on this, and the 4GB of flash disk space are almost all eaten up by the OS.

* I also uninstalled Brasero because the device doesn't have a CD burner.

INSTALLING OTHER SOFTWARE

* I installed Boxee which worked after a little bit of tweaking, as per other posts on this forum. Boxee is also at an early alpha stage and is still broken in many places. It just has a much cooler UI than MythTV and they received some funding so I hope they'll work on it more - a new version for Ubuntu should be coming out these days.

* I installed SDLMame for arcade games, and got it working after some tweaking. I'll look for a front-end for it. Gnome-video-arcade is pretty simple but doesn't have Debian packages - and I definitely don't want to compile anything on LINK!!

* I'll try Songbird on it too - I'm currently Rhythmbox but I think Songbird has cooler features. I'll try to connect the iPod to Songbird and report any problems.

MODIFICATIONS TO THE UI

* I modified GNOME's appearance to use 16pt fonts. The standard 12pt were just too straining on my and my family's eyes :-)

* I copied the main applications' icons to the desktop: Boxee, Rhythmbox, Firefox, SDLMame. I think that exposing the main apps this way (and giving them human-friendly names) would work well as a starting screen for most people below 50!

* I associated avi an other video files to VLC instead of the default. VLC works better IMO. I'll also make it open fullscreen by default.

* I removed the NeurosTV Web page as the default Firefox home page. It's frankly not that great and most shows are not available here in Canada! Instead, I'm using the Speed Dial add-on with my favorite video sites.

ISSUES AND WISHLIST

* I connected an external USB HD full of media to LINK, it was recognized without problems. But when I turned on the LINK with the USB HD attached, the boot loader got confused as to which drive to boot from. I had to poweroff the HD and reboot. I'll make another post to follow up on that.

* Boot faster. There's been talk about that on the Linux kernel mailing list, reaching booting times of 5 seconds. That's a good target!


That's it for now. Thanks Neuros for a neat idea, and for such an open development process.

[jsdf]

Thanks for the feedback, kratib!  Most of what you suggest are things we plan on implementing in the near future as well (except for removing Neuros.TV as the homepage, of course!).

Please keep posting feedback and suggestions as you have them.

Also, you wrote:

* I modified GNOME's appearance to use 16pt fonts. The standard 12pt were just too straining on my and my family's eyes :-)

We will approach this by changing GNOME's default DPI from 96 to ~150.  This seems to make the UI far more comfortable from far away, and apply more generally to everything than just to font size.

[JoeBorn]

* I also uninstalled Evolution and OpenOffice, because hey - I won't do office work on this, and the 4GB of flash disk space are almost all eaten up by the OS.

* I also uninstalled Brasero because the device doesn't have a CD burner.

This is just common sense, we should do this too

INSTALLING OTHER SOFTWARE

* I installed Boxee which worked after a little bit of tweaking, as per other posts on this forum. Boxee is also at an early alpha stage and is still broken in many places. It just has a much cooler UI than MythTV and they received some funding so I hope they'll work on it more - a new version for Ubuntu should be coming out these days.

can you talk about the tweaking you did?  This could be helpful for others (including me

* I'll try Songbird on it too - I'm currently Rhythmbox but I think Songbird has cooler features. I'll try to connect the iPod to Songbird and report any problems.

This was a snap in my experience.  I found a deb file for 1.0, which I'll look for the link and post shortly.

* I copied the main applications' icons to the desktop: Boxee, Rhythmbox, Firefox, SDLMame. I think that exposing the main apps this way (and giving them human-friendly names) would work well as a starting screen for most people below 50!

agreed.

* I associated avi an other video files to VLC instead of the default. VLC works better IMO. I'll also make it open fullscreen by default.

agreed, we should do the same.

* I removed the NeurosTV Web page as the default Firefox home page. It's frankly not that great and most shows are not available here in Canada! Instead, I'm using the Speed Dial add-on with my favorite video sites.

it's improving and I think helps even today with search (I think you'll find in very useful before too long), but obviously we figured there was good correlation between those that wouldn't need it and those that know how to change the default

ISSUES AND WISHLIST

* I connected an external USB HD full of media to LINK, it was recognized without problems. But when I turned on the LINK with the USB HD attached, the boot loader got confused as to which drive to boot from. I had to poweroff the HD and reboot. I'll make another post to follow up on that.

* Boot faster. There's been talk about that on the Linux kernel mailing list, reaching booting times of 5 seconds. That's a good target!

These are known bugs, and we're migrating all the bugs to http://bugzilla.neurostechnology.com so you'll be able to enter directly and see our progress