Many of us here at the forum already have smart homes. Although I am sure you could invent much better systems than we currently use... I think I will just stick with what I have. I (and millions of other X10 customers) can assure you.. X10 works very well.
I'm simply going on the theory that if I already have such unreliable communication inside one room, all on the same phase (missing quite a few commands) then perhaps it's better for me to test something with more robust communications (Insteon as a start) before I make a major investment. And consider whether I want to control some specific things with simple relays.
Don't know if you would want to do this but, have you thought of using virtualbox with a windows guest? I have Linux Mint with virtualbox running a windows xp as guest. Currently i'm running an Ihouse client and it works great.
I just tried to switch to Linux about 6 months ago but, I haven't had much luck with automation using it. But I am still a Newbie at Linux.
Somewhere I have a VirtualBox machine setup with XP, mainly for snooping serial communications when I'm writing Linux-based replacements for proprietary software. At this point, I'm totally dedicated to Linux. Being that I work with Linux for a living, and am paid to solve problems, "it's easier with Windows" isn't an excuse I can use.
Windows and Linux (and any Unix, or even the core of Max OS X) were designed two totally ways, with two totally different thought patterns, and totally different goals. When you move from Windows to Linux, a lot of things simply don't make sense. Likewise, I've been using Linux long enough that Windows doesn't make sense to me. Things like having to update software through all different ways, rather than just typing two words at the command line and having everything updated... or with Windows, not being able to do *everything* I can do in front of my computer from a slow connection on a cell phone. Most importantly, especially for home automation, I want something that will run on a SMALL computer (think Linksys router, $100 single-board computer, etc.).
I appreciate all of the advice, but I'm already sold on Linux. At this point, the big decision is just going to be what technology (X10, Insteon, Z-Wave, etc.) gives me what I want, and which one will minimize the amount of custom hardware I want to build.
To tell where I'm coming from, I've done one HA project in the past - a few years ago, when I was in school and living in an apartment with a few roommates, I realized that our thermostat was horribly inefficient. So, I ripped it off of the wall, replaced it with a USB-controlled relay board (4x 30A relays), and hooked that up to a Linux-based computer which also had a Dallas 1-wire temperature sensor in each room. I wrote software that polled the temperature every 1 minute, and included all of our school and work schedules, in excruciating detail. The heat was only on when we were home. It understood that if I was the only person home over the weekend, it could ignore the temperatures of the other bedrooms. It even kept data on previous heating cycles, so that I could set the temperature to be 65 degrees at 8 PM on Tuesday, and it would kick on just early enough to heat the apartment to 65 degrees at 8 PM.
Bottom line - I want to be able to positively tell the status of everything that's controlled (even if that means using light sensors on every fixture), monitor everything, and have positive control. My personal feeling on HA is a lot closer to industrial control/automation than X10. If it weren't so expensive, I'd have everything running on SCADA boxes...