As I noted in the forums a few days back, we have set up a public chat room for OpenRemote community. The idea is to let you participate in our discussions as they happen, real time, to check up on what we are doing on any given day or just say hello if you are a new member.

Our recent conversations have revolved around hardware and Linux distributions. We have been deep in investigating the Eee Box for various boot and BIOS options, installing Linux on it to replace the default Windows XP distribution and seeing how it could be used as hardware platform for a dedicated HA application.

I am the first to admit I am quite attracted to this box :-) It has a great price point at around $300 for what it can do, it is a multi-purpose PC architecture that runs some popular Linux distributions quite nicely with the usual bells and whistles. You get good connectivity with LAN and WiFi, 4 USB ports, and an SD card slot. Plenty of power from the 1.6Ghz N270 Atom to run the latest Java stacks (which some affectionately call 'bloatware'). DVI out to play back movies at 720p resolution. Not the ultimate in home theathers yet but getting there.

It's a great little box -- and apparently selling great too given the dearth of boxes at least over here in Europe.

What we've been doing the past week is trying to validate the hardware in the Eee box for our purposes. We now have it running with Ubuntu and lircd installed including the infrared transceiver from IguanaWorks (however I am debugging some issues with the IR at the moment). I am hunched over this little box next to the TV and manage to change channels from the terminal instead of the usual remote, excited like a little kid. Can't hide my geek genes. My girlfriend thinks I've lost my marbles and tries to give me the old remote back.

Just wait until the iPhone interface and the macros we get going there.

Back to the chat. If you want to follow all this live as it is happening, join the chat. It can be high volume at times so be prepared for it. We are using Skype at the moment. Yes we know some people take issue with that :-) It is a compromise and something we will replace eventually with a Jabber server but for the moment it will do. Later we will support more chat clients, add web based chat and support more operating systems as well.

Time to dig back into the IR drivers...

-- Juha