What is happening with zoneminder?

[ivansopin]

Zoneminder is one particular app that I would like to try with Amahi, but it seems to have been in alpha for a few years now. Can any of the developers/testers share the plans regarding its release date?

I just freshly installed Ubuntu 12.04 after a glitch in upgrade from 11.04->11.10, but during the short time I kept 11.10, I tried deploying zoneminder via apt-get install, and it went very smooth. I remember that to get zoneminder to compile/install/configure on 11.04 was a major nightmare (at least for me).

That said, I believe that under Ubuntu 12.04 it should not be very difficult to cook an Amahi-friendly zoneminder package, and I would even volunteer to do so.

Comments/thoughts?

[cpg]

ZM has always been a hard app to package, because it needs hardware of some form or another and the distros used to be behind.

We just added you as a collaborator to it, however, you will also need to be in the contributors group to edit the app for others to use and you need to agree to that (please PM or email support agreeing). It's not a light commitment if you want to maintain an app.

It's good to hear newer distributions have it working more smoothly!

[bigfoot65]

There is another camera app that I worked for a few months last year called Kmotion.

http://www.amahi.org/apps/kmotion

I had it working at one time, but that was with Fedora. I also had he author assisting at one point. We might be able to get him to help again if needed.

Just another option.

[cpg]

Good point! Choice is good!

[ivansopin]

Yeah, I see that KMotion might be a good alternative, but its status is also "alpha" Anyway, let me play with zoneminder a bit and note down a list of issues that need to be addressed in order for this to work on Ubuntu 12.04 with hardware analogous to mine. After that I can try to contribute to the app.

One thing I had to do so far was to change the /var/hda/web-apps/zoneminder/html soft link to point to /usr/share/zoneminder instead of /usr/share/zoneminder/www, which does not exist. The other thing was to create a soft link /usr/share/zoneminder/javascript -> ../javascript in order to get the mootools scripts to work. (Do not really know why they sit in /usr/share; perhaps, they are used by more than one app.) Before I can test any further, I need to get my EasyCap converter to cooperate, and so far I have not had any luck. I do have a USB webcam which has worked with zoneminder before, so if all my attempts with EasyCap fail, I will be testing with the webcam. Will keep you posted.

[bigfoot65]

Sounds good. If you can document the steps to get things working, we can update the app accordingly.

Thanks for helping out and look forward to hearing about your progress.