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Xbmcbuntu is ideal for what you want- it is a lightweight distro, but with the ability to install all of Ubuntu packages. As angelscry said, set it up to autostart the desktop session and then autostart xbmc. If you want a games console replacement take a look at windows instead of xbmcbuntu - loads more games and emulators. I dual boot openelec and win7 for this purpose (if you're interested I've put together a xbmc add on to reboot once to another os without using a keyboard)
And one thing, its never going to be as seamless as a console. Eg far cry 3 - loads through steam but every time its exited a window for ubisofts uplay shows up and it can't be closed with a controller, you need a mouse/keyboard.
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i0ls
Junior Member
Posts: 30
nah I totally understand that its never going to be easy as turning on a tv or playing anything on a console. The thing is I think its completely worth the extra work both using it and building it. not to mention a huge savings over paying a boatload of money for a product that's just as fun as say some good indie game from steam that costs 15 bucks.
i am more than willing to make a sacrifice in regards to that.
then there's the bit where gaming comes into play. absolutely windows has far better support for hardware and a broad venue of games available. but in the end its still windows i would rather go open source and just miss out on a few big title games.
since my last post i have taken my htpc down and setup Ubuntu. yes its heavier and has stuff i might not need, but a lot of the time i spent messing with xbmcbuntu installing things that were already there on a full fledged distro. I recall many if this were only .... this stuff would already be there, i wouldn't have to install it and its dependencies manually. maybe trimming fat is easier than building from scratch.
by say tomorrow afternoon i will have this to where my last setup was, and hopefully i can report back with some good news and launchers working.
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i0ls
Junior Member
Posts: 30
well i suppose its not too late to change things. although i don't notice a difference in performance at all going from xbmcbuntu to ubuntu. but ill look into those suggestions.
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i0ls
Junior Member
Posts: 30
teedubb,
the launcher finally works. upon exiting steam xbmc relaunches and none of the local content on my second hard drive is loaded and xbmc immediately hangs.
so close yet so far
any ideas?
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i0ls
Junior Member
Posts: 30
i am running
ubuntu 64 bit
on
i3 3.1
8gb ripsaw
asock h67m
samsung ssd
geforce gtx650ti
as soon as i figure out how to post the logs for this i will. will take a little googling after work tonight.
thx
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Hope this isn't a problem posting in an old thread but I've been trying to get steam launching from xbmcuntu as unfortunately the addon doesn't work. I thought I'd put this here in case anybody else is searching for the answer. I use this script, just set it to run from advanced launcher and make sure you enable windowed mode:
openbox-session &
killall -15 xbmc.bin
steam -bigpicture
killall -9 openbox
killall -9 steam
/usr/bin/xbmc --standalone --no-test
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denz13
Senior Member
Posts: 211
This might be a stupid question...
Instead of having to boot into openbox or the standard kodibuntu desktop manager in order to use steam, would it be possible to create a script that logs out of the Kodi session then into a desktop manager and start steam in big picture mode for instance?