Installation on Windows

My main installation of Misterhouse is on Debian, however I run a windows copy for development and for verifying my modifications on Windows. I've made a couple of notes here regarding Windows, however this information is just a few notes.

Perl

Install ActiveState perl V5.8
Use the following to add the trouchelle repository and a minimum set of required packages:
ppm rep add trouchelle.com http://trouchelle.com/ppm/
ppm install DB_File
ppm install Win32-Setupsup

I don't run the TK inteface.

Installation on Debian

There is at least one person maintaining a DEB for Misterhouse, but I found that it was not updated much, if at all. Given the hackery nature of the Misterhouse development process I felt it necessary to install Misterhouse so that I could apply patches as needed, possibly with local Subversion control.

Install dependencies:

perl (>= 5.6.0-16)
perl-tk (>= 800.024-1)
libterm-readkey-perl (>= 2.21-1)
libdbi-perl (>= 1.35-1)
libhtml-parser-perl (>= 3.35-1)

Recommends: librrds-perl (>= 1.0.35-1)
tk8.4 (>= 8.4.5-1)
libtime-hires-perl (>= 1.20-4) Part of perl 5.8
libgd-gd2-perl
libdbd-mysql-perl (>= 1.2216-2) Could not find
libmime-base64-perl (>= 2.12-4) Could not find

libaudio-mixer-perl
flite
alsa

Add a mh user

Extract the mh package as the mh user

Generate local html documentation for the MH web server

This can be accessed under the "MrHouse Home" / "Local Documents" buttons
cd /usr/local/misterhouse/mh/docs
for i in *.pod; do pod2html $i > ${i/.pod/}.html; done

Add a startup process

I tried using daemontools but this has one serious limitation. For security reasons the author of daemontools intentionally does not inherit any group permissions for the running user. This makes it difficult to manage permissions for devices (e.g. /dev/audio). I gave up on daemontools and currently use "nohup mh&" to manually start mh. This works ok since the server is on UPS and is rarely if ever restarted. I hope to use one of the included start scripts in mh/bin at some point.

Starting and Stoping

Manually

• Headless / without X-Windows / TK

• Using X-Windows / TK

NOTE: I highly recommend using X-windows for cygwin if youre OS is MSWin

Configuration

Reference

Getting To Know MH
MH man page

Customize the initialization file

• Edit the configuraiton file:

• Add the following entries:

Create the items file (*.hmt)

cp /usr/local/misterhouse/mh/code/test/test.mht ~/code/items.mht

• Navigate to the items editor:

MrHouse Home / Setup MrHouse / Edit Items

• Pick the items.hmt file to edit.
• Delete entries you don't need. (Leave at least one group)
• Create new groups by using the "copy" link on another group.
• Edit and create new X10 items.

Create triggers

• Navigate to the items editor:

MrHouse Home / Setup MrHouse / Edit Triggers

• Create the following triggers:

• Set them all to "NoExpire" except charger which should be "Disabled"

Enable Speech

• load package flite
• Add the following to mh.private.ini

Updating MH

My MH installation uses two directories where /var contains the mh home directory, user code, and data; /usr contains the mh application. The directories are owned by the mh user. The procedures below assume that the code directory mh is a logical link to the actual MH application directory.

Starting from a tar file

As the mh user:

Starting from SVN

Need to update this once I install subversion and give it a whirl
As the mh user, create a new Misterhouse directory:

To update to the latest changes in the same branch:

Don't forget to check the output of the status command to ensure that svn didn't have problems merging any of your own changes to MH

Generate local html documentation for the MH web server

This can be accessed under the "MrHouse Home" / "Local Documents" buttons
cd /usr/local/misterhouse/mh/docs
for i in *.pod; do pod2html $i > ${i/.pod/}.html; done

Shut down and restart MH

Your method may be different:
As the root user:

Updating the Local data Directory

Unfortunately new additions to this directory can not be guaranteed to occur in the MH or user modules. Some modules will look in the program directory first some don't. I use the procedure below to update the directory manually. This might not be necessary in cases where the associated modules manage the contents; manually copying the files might even cause a module to fail it that module expects to maintain those files.


Manually copied:
data/phone/phone.area_codes.list
data/shopping_list.txt
data/event_sounds.txt
data/holidays.ca_ab
data/remarks/full_moon.txt
data/infrared/devicelib/*
data/mpd/*
data/alpha/*

Ignored these plus a few more:
data/code_select*
data/tv_*
data/web/comics
data/web/earthquakes.gif
data/web/PLNRM.html
data/web/earchquakes.txt
data/web/top10_list.html
data/web/top10_list.txt

Debugging

Debug Variable List

perl -an -e 'if(/\$main::Debug\{\s*(\S+)\s*\}/){ \
$H{$1.":".$ARGV}++;} \
END{foreach $h (sort(keys(%H))){ \
print( $h."==".$H{$h}."\n");}}' `find .`

Get a stack trace on failure

use Carp;
$SIG{ __DIE__ } = sub { Carp::confess( @_ ) };