Decompiled

LG has announced that they will adopt ZigBee technology to power their HomNet System. LG, one of the leading providers of home appliances and entertainment equipment/devices is lending some much needed support to the ZigBee technology at a time when it’s reliability is being questioned.
I will not hide the fact that I am a fan of Zwave for no other reasons than I really like the protocol and it just works coupled with the recent disclosure of an “independant” study stating that other wireless networks sharing the 2.4-GHz band (wireless home networks /WLAN, microwaves, cordless phones, garage door openers), cause ZigBee signals to decay, and in some cases, fail completely.

As far as the studies go, I cannot say if there was any bias involved or support from other competitors (read: z-wave alliance <wink> ), but if there is any truth to the statements, then I for one will be seeking real data to contradict the statements.

References:
http://electronics.ihs.com/news/zwave-zigbee-wlan.htm
The whitepaper created from the study mentioned above.

I have been using PlutoHome as a home automation solution to control lighting, media (A/V), and my home phone network. LinuxMCE is a direct branch of PlutoHome originally ported to run on top of an Ubuntu Desktop. With the latest Beta of LinuxMCE, the desktop of choice is now Kubunu, the KDE version of Ubuntu. This change was made in order to overcome a limitation of Gnome’s X11 implementation that is not apparent in KDE.

To start things off, I downloaded 3 ISO files.

1. Kubuntu install disk
2. LinuxMCE Packages disk
3. LinuxMCE Cache Disk

The LinuxMCE Packages and Cache disk are available as a single torrent file.

After downloading the ISO files, they were burned to CD using Nero.

Installing Kubuntu:
The first step to the actual install is make sure the target system is able to boot from a CD. This can be set by accessing the system BIOS, and setting the CDRom as the first boot device in the boot sequence. Refer to you Motherboard’s BIOS information for instructions on setting this up. (more…)