Zoneminder, argh. I'm not sure how much time I've put into getting Zoneminder to work but it's a lot. There's just something about it that confounds me, whether it's because of the underlying OS or hardware problems...Zoneminder seems to be the typical open source linux app. Very capable, ugly as sin and exceedingly difficult to get working right, unless you are the geek "they" designed it for.
So, I've decided to punt. At some point getting something done becomes more important than playing and learning. I bought my PV149 card from BlueCherry some time ago and I check back in with them from time to time. They've long had a reference to Blue Iris as a Windows alternative. I'm trying it out and so far it couldn't be easier to use. I'm a little concerned that it doesn't handle load as well and is banging on the server pretty hard, but it seems to be getting by ok.
I'll report back once I've played with the motion detection and the alerting system.