Apress - Smart Home Automation with Linux (2010)- P54:Linux users can now control their homes remotely! Are you a Linux user who has ever wanted to turn on the lights in your house, or open and close the curtains, while away on holiday? Want to be able to play the same music in every room, controlled from your laptop or mobile phone? Do you want to do these things without an expensive off-the-shelf kit | CHAPTER 7 CONTROL HUBS Figure 7-6. The photo frame can operate as a slide show on kiosk machines. By clicking the main image this app can work in the full browser window making it suitable as an interactive photo frame for those times when a machine is not being used as a control panel. You can cycle through the images using hotspots on the left and right of the image while the lower portion returns you to non-full-screen mode. The Internet has a lot of available images to fit the frame including those for the culture vultures at http . Information These applets provide information about the real world which is also useful and valid when outside the house. There is potential overlap from these and your lifestyle but it s a good enough distinction for now Moonbeam is an applet that relies on MySQL to store a list of bookmarks each with multiple tags. It is similar to http except that all data is held on your own server. To prepare the database you can run the build applets moonbeam script using your existing root account mysql -u your_username -h your_machine_name -p Then enter your password to build an empty database. You can populate it with sample links by adding the same credentials to the file in the same directory and running the following php You can then add this account information to the Moonbeam s web configuration at conf moonbeam and use the applet as normal. If you want to create an alternate user to access the Moonbeam database which is recommended then log into MySQL and enter the following CREATE USER moonbeam @ localhost IDENTIFIED BY some_pass GRANT SELECT on moonbeam. TO moonbeam @ localhost 248 CHAPTER 7 CONTROL HUBS And amend the web configuration as shown earlier. The weather applet simply reads the precached forecasts made earlier in the day by the Minerva user s crontab stored in var log minerva cache and var log minerva cache .
