Motion Support Guidelines

Motion support is provided by users and developers in their spare time - nobody is paid to do this. So it's important that you provide enough information in your support question to resolve your problem in an efficient way - hence these guidelines.

Do not email Kenneth or Jeroen directly

Supporting Motion takes 1-2 hours a day for Kenneth. It takes around 15-30 minutes to answer a support question.

Answers given on the Support Requests pages or on the Mailing List can benefit 1000s of people in the future. And many experienced Motion users help answering questions every day.

Private emails only help one person.

Kenneth likes to help and support questions are normally answered within a few days.

'How do I do this?' questions

Questions about whether Motion can do something are fine and don't need all the installation specifics (operating system, libraries etc.). However, please supply the Motion version you are using.

'Something is not working' questions

For all other questions, which are where something is not working, please read the rest of this page and supply full details.

Check for Known Issues

See the Known Problems page in the Motion Guide and look at the Frequently Asked Questions

Asking yourself the right questions

Any support request that just says "it's not working" is basically useless - it doesn't help anyone understand exactly what is going on, which is an essential step to fixing your problem.

Some key questions to ask yourself are:

• What happens? Symptoms are good, but what are the exact error messages, in console and the system error logs?
• When does the problem happen? What were you doing? Does it happen on all the time?
• Did you just change your Motion setup, e.g. activating new feature, adding new hardware, upgrading your kernel or changing the motion config files?

What's needed

Please provide at least the following information - additional detail is welcome where relevant.

Motion version info

• Motion Version. And if your version is not the latest - please try this first! Your problem may have been solved. It can also be that a newer version does not work but an older does. Then it is important to know also the old version number.

Kernel version

• Version of your kernel and if you customized it.

Shared Libraries Info

• Version of all relevant libraries
  • ffmpeg
  • mysql
  • postgresql

Error info

• Any output in the syslog (typically /var/log/messages)
• Any output to the console. Try in non-daemon mode to get more output
• The entire output from running ./configure
• The entire output from running make

Config info

• Your motion.conf file
• Your thread config files

You can attach files to the question.

VERBATIM TAGS

Please put config file text, error messages etc between a line that says <VERBATIM> and one that says </VERBATIM>.

TWiki does not add line breaks or paragraph breaks unless you ask it to. This is because TWiki allows normal HTML code to be used also. By placing your text with line breaks between VERBATIM tags TWiki shows the text with line breaks and with fixed pitch font.

-- KennethLavrsen - 22 Apr 2005