Thread: iGuidance 2.1.3 in Wine

Man am I glad to finally hear someone else using Linux with MythTV. It's great news to see iGuidance works with CrossOver, I will have to try this setup. I was thinking about switching to IG, now I can go forward.

Timekiller..You mentioned Myth .20 and a touchscreen, does your theme have a back button to allow you to exit a screen or are you using the remote/keyboard for this?

On the same topic, have you been able to use iGuidance while listening to music?

In my setup, I had to modify the Myth .15 software for touchscreen/mouse, but also added a back button so all navigation is by touchscreen. (I've been thinking about upgrading to .20 in the car, but am concerned about this back feature) Then I had to use a different WM like FluxBox to give task switching. This allowed me to start the GPS program, switch back to Myth, and start MythMusic. I can switch back and forth with the task bar, but a more integrated solution would be nicer. Right now, I use an IR remote to change songs in the background while looking at the GPS program. I have no keyboard attached to the system, so I use an on-screen KB in the task bar. This has been working for about a year and a half now with no problems, but I really want to get away from Win4Lin and Delorme (no touchscreen support).

I was thinking about modifying Myth .20 to get a persistent MythMusic running. With your theme experience (nice theme BTW), have you run into anything allowing mythmusic to remain running even after the screen has been exited? I'm thinking of running it as its own process, but then there's other problems to resolve.

afd100,

as far as the touchscreen goes, myth allows for gesture based navigation, but it only applies to the menus, not the plugins mythmusic for example). So, if you touch the menu item for "setup", then want to go back, you put your finger on the far right side of the screen, and drag it to the left. unfortunately, this does not work to exit plugins and get back to the main menu. Myth has greatly improved the mouse support, but I still have to use the fabricated control panel for mythmusic, mythvideo, etc. There has been talk on the mailing list (mostly by me ) to continue working on this to add full mouse support, but I don't think anyone is actively working on it.

As for listening to music while using iGuidance, this is the second headache I am currently dealing with. MythMusic does not allow you to exit, and leave music playing. For the Google Summer of Code, Myth had a bunch of projects lined up, one of which was a complete rewrite of mythmusic, hot items were to rewrite the playlist interface, and make it so you could exit the plugin and leave it playing. I was VERY excited about this, but from what I here, the developer they had lined up bailed, and the project got dropped

It would be technically possible to launch iGuidance and listen to music, but it would require 2 things: first, launch iGuidance outside of Myth, this way Myth is not "hung" while iGuidance is running. Second, you need a way to "alt-tab" between myth and iGuidance. It's not pretty, but it would work. Sounds like this is basically what you are currently doing.

There is nothing theme wise (that I know of) you can do to add a back button, but the mailing list talk was basically to add a button that would only be visible if your themed called it. This way you are not changing the user experience for the "TV" users, but still have the functionality for the touchscreen users. If you want to work on such a patch, I would be happy to help any way I can (though, sadly I am no QT developer). I'm sure the patch would be welcomed by the mythcommunity Same goes for a patch to leave mythmusic running on exit

BTW: Crossover Office 6 was officially released today. I downloaded it, installed on my carpc, and now I don't have the annoying "this is a beta" nag screen. One more thing knocked off the checklist!

Timekiller,
Thanks for the reply. The Back button I added was to the myth code, and still supports the theme. Unfortunately, it needs to be added to every plugin individually, but was really easy to do. I will look at the Myth.20 code, and try to add this in.

If you don't want the back button on the screen, you just don't include it in your theme. I know becuase in the process of adding the button, I could not get it to show until I added it to the theme. Also, the Theme can move the button (I guess this is standard for all themed buttons). Actually, I would like to add more buttons, now that I've thought about it, and a file handling plugin for updating music and movies without a keybaord.

The way I launch the GPS program is in the theme, I added a menu button with a command "EXEC LaunchGPS". LaunchGPS is a script, with "/usr/bin/win -f &" (launches win4lin in fullscreen) This forks a new process, and runs the program separately from the Myth process. And your right, I use alt-tab or the taskbar to switch back to Myth. I have yet to find a way to use LIRCD to send alt-tab, or to switch processes easily, so this is my pain with this setup.

Now here's the interesting part: What if the theme launched the plugin using the ampersand instead of just calling it. It's been a while since I played with this, but I might try it as well. Maybe then, the mythmusic interface would keep running, and at first try, one could alt-tab back to Myth. At least that's my initial thoughts. Then a socket file could be used to control the mythmusic interface (to coordinate the starting/stoping of music with other plugins), or better yet, tie into the LIRCD socket. Maybe this is actually a new thread somewhere else.

Look for and/or install the wmctrl program and call it with parameters from irexec using LIRCD to have it switch processes for you.

Originally Posted by tdb30_

Look for and/or install the wmctrl program and call it with parameters from irexec using LIRCD to have it switch processes for you.

That's perfect! I don't use lirc for my carpc, but my mind is already racing on things i can do with this...

thanks tdb30!

Finally,
I was able to get IGuidance and some setup stuff working. I tried 2 configurations:

Normal Wine under Ubuntu 6.10
Crossover office 6 - release

Under Wine, everything worked. This was the apt-get version of wine, 0.9.22. The graphics were slightly messed up on every popup, and the on screen keyboard was unusable, again from the graphics problem.

With Crossover, there were slight display problems, but everything was definitely usable. I noticed no performance problems on the PIII 1.1 GHZ, 384MB Ram, Ubuntu 6.10.

I will try to get my actual carpc redhat system running with crossover and see what happens.

Also, I'm almost done addingt he mouse support to the rest of the myth plugins i use (DVD, Music, and Video). It was a little more code than I though, but seems to be working fine. I also added back buttons to each plugin and screen.

BTW, has anyone tried Crossover office using iMedia linux? I'm playing with this distro, and it boots very fast.

Yes, I'm getting them ready. I am putting together my skin right now, and can post them somewhere. The skin includes all the available added buttons.

I've modified the SVN source release of myth, version .20.1. I have changed Main menus, MythMusic, MythVideo, and MythDVD to include back buttons and some menu support. Also added support to navigate the selection lists. I have not done anything with the TV portion of myth. I'm still trying to get the popup keyboard working in all the places you would want it, and some screens still are not modified. In my skin, I have modified the menus and stuff for what I use in my car.

The best part is if you do not have the buttons defined in the skin, they disappear and don't interfere with normal Myth. I would really like to get another opinion about the implementation. These are all done under redhat 9.

Just some questions though: I am not making a distribution, but I'll tar the source directories. Does that work for you? Can you compile the source? How would you like the changes, by email or posted on a site? Let me know.