I’ve got a Tivo with the Home Media Option, which lets your Tivo play music from your computer’s MP3 collection. JavaHMO is a third-party server program that is a vast improvement over Tivo’s software, which lets your Tivo do things like show the local weather forecast, the movie schedules at your local cineplex, show internet webcams, and even listen to Shoutcast radio streams.

After installing JavaHMO 1.2 on the Xandros Desktop 2.0, I didn’t get any errors, but JavaHMO didn’t start and didn’t write a log file. Every time JavaHMO starts, it’s supposed to write its logs to /var/log/javaHMO.log. You can start it manually by going to a command line and typing “jhmo start”, and if it doesn’t create the log file, you need to do some work to your system.

According to the JavaHMO FAQ, you have to do a few special steps to get JavaHMO running on Debian, but some people may not be aware that Xandros is based on Debian. Even if you know that, what needs to happen after the JavaHMO installation isn’t exactly intuitive.

First, install the “equivs” package in Xandros Networks. Then, logged in as the administrator (that’s what Xandros calls root), follow the directions at http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-java-faq/ch11.html#s11.2 to build the Java dummy control packages. After building the packages, they tell you to use the “update-alternatives” command, but the syntax they give is wrong, and there’s an easier way anyway. Instead, just open Xandros File Manager and double-click on each of the .deb files, choose Launch Xandros Networks, install. The dummy packages have dependencies, so do the java1-runtime-dummy, then java2-runtime-dummy, then the java-virtual-machine-dummy and the rest in any order.

While still logged in as root, start the terminal and type “jhmo start”. Nothing spectacular will happen, but look in /var/log for a file named javaHMO.log, and if it’s there, at least you got it to start.

Wasn’t that fun? And who says Linux isn’t ready for the desktop, eh?