Installing Trial Software

upstatemike

upstatemike

Senior Member
I need some advice for installing trial copies of HS2.1, CQC, and Housebot...

On homeseer I want to do a trial of the upgrade from 1.7- Will the install just update my existing 1.7 stuff? I can't find a sticky on the Homeseer board that tells exactly what the steps are. I also don't see an upgrade option for 1.7 to 2.1 on the download page.... I see 2.0 to 2.1 and I see 1.6 to 1.7 but no 1.7 to 2.1???

On CQC, can I put it on the same box that is running Homeseer or do I need a different box for the demo?

Same question for Housebot.
 
upstatemike said:
I need some advice for installing trial copies of HS2.1, CQC, and Housebot...

On homeseer I want to do a trial of the upgrade from 1.7- Will the install just update my existing 1.7 stuff? I can't find a sticky on the Homeseer board that tells exactly what the steps are. I also don't see an upgrade option for 1.7 to 2.1 on the download page.... I see 2.0 to 2.1 and I see 1.6 to 1.7 but no 1.7 to 2.1???

On CQC, can I put it on the same box that is running Homeseer or do I need a different box for the demo?

Same question for Housebot.
Click to expand...
I use VMWare images I created for testing software like this. Hardware access can be hit and miss, but it does allow you to easily get a feel for the software without interfering with your normal machines/servers. Another benefit is that you can go back to the original image and re-install the demos/trials to extend your time a bit if you absolutely need to.

Note that I do not advocate using this method to circumvent time constraints for the purpose of not buying commercial software products. I purchase licenses for all the commercial software that I test in this manner and determine to be useful to me.

Sorry, no help on the Homeseer upgrade.

Brent
 
Mike,
You didn't ask, but MainLobby installs into two directories in a couple of minutes and you can Uninstall easily as well. The demo is full featured and times out in 30 days of a registered license isn't applied. You can also trial the MLHSPlugin which bridges between Homeseer and MainLobbby if that is your architecture choice.
If you need some walk thru, PM me with your phone number and I can get you thru all of the steps to get going
David
 
upstatemike said:
On CQC, can I put it on the same box that is running Homeseer or do I need a different box for the demo?
Click to expand...
I have HomeSeer and CQC on the same box without problems.

I typically only have one or the other running at any given time as I try things, but don't know of a reason to do that.
 
Yeah, CQC is well behaved. Easy to install and remove. It basically only creates 1 windows service and then its files in its own directory. It does not mess with your registry or system folders.
 
Be careful of everyone trying to put a web server on port 80. Don't know about the others but CQC allows you to control the port usage. It's unlikely that any of CQC's normal ports would conflict, but the HTTP port is a commony used one.

CQC does the following:

1. Puts files in the install directory
2. Creates some start menu items
3. Creates a service entry (which points to a program in the CQC directory.)

So it doesn't install anything into system directories or make any changes to system configuration or install any magic bits. To remove it, just run the uninstaller from teh start menu and then remove the directory.

If you are using CQC just for trial purposes, you might not want the back end running all the time. You can put the service into manual startup mode and just start/stop it when you want to play with it.
 
I've had all three trial versions on a box at the same time without problems. All were clean installs so I can't help with he HS upgrade. As far as Housebot; it's only listening port by default is 5900 for the Software Remotes so I don't think you'll have any problems with it stepping on anything else.

Terry
 
As the clock continues to wind down my progress with the trials is not good:

CQC loaded OK. I created a timed event to fire once per minute as a test (it just speaks "This is a test"). I used the test button and it works fine. Watch the status that shows the next activation time but when the clock ticks over to the next minute nothing happens.

Homeseer loaded OK. I loaded the Stargate plugin and get an error in the log every time a Stargate Timer is set (many times per minute in my system). I tried to load the VWS plugin following the instructions which have me copy files and folders into the Homeseer 2 directory. Those files already exist in the Homeseer 2 directory and there is no instruction about whether they should be overwritten or left alone if they are there.

I'm sure there are solutions to all of these things but can I figure them out in time to make a decision? (Bearing in mind that I won't be permitted to devote my whole weekend to evaluating trial software).

!!!!! Suddenly as I am typing this the CQC event has started working! I wonder what caused the initial 5 minutes of silence?
 
upstatemike said:
!!!!! Suddenly as I am typing this the CQC event has started working! I wonder what caused the initial 5 minutes of silence?
Click to expand...
I tried it and it fired consistently starting the first minute.

But it depends on the voice you are using, especially if it was AT&T Kate, sometimes on the weekends she gets laryngitis and it takes her a few minutes to get her voice back. ;)
 
My default voice is ATT Audrey. It stopped again after firing about 10 times. Not sure what the deal is.

****EDIT****

Started working again while I was on the CQC demo (lucky I had my phone on mute) then stopped again after 3 or 4 times. Guess I 'll go wrestle with HS for awhile.
 
Bring up the log monitor and if there are errors occuring, you will see them happen. Rest assured that something this fundamental works, and that it's something specific to your situation that needs to be figured out.

One thing to consider is did you set the 'async' flag on the say text command? If so, that's not good for that kind of scheduled event, because the thread can complete and shut down before the speech even get's going sometimes. You want to indicate that it's not async (meaning that it's synchronous) so that the call to say the text will not return until the TTS completes.
 
I have to look at it again later tonight. It started going again and I couldn't get it to shut up even after I quit out of CQC! I had to go into task manager and kill everything with CQC in the name. Now when I try to start it up again I just get a "waiting for CQC" window. I'll do a reboot tonight and check that asynch flag.
 
I have to look at it again later tonight. It started going again and I couldn't get it to shut up even after I quit out of CQC! I had to go into task manager and kill everything with CQC in the name. Now when I try to start it up again I just get a "waiting for CQC" window. I'll do a reboot tonight and check that asynch flag.
Click to expand...

This is kind of a problem in that you haven't gone through any of the tutorials so you aren't understanding how it works. It's a client/server product so the GUI program is nothing but an interface into the back end that's really doing all the work. So it wouldn't be expected to stop the scheduled event processing.

And killing the processes is definitely not the right thing to do. It's a service. IYou start and stop services via the Windows service interface, and control whether they start up automatically when the system starts and so forth.
 
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