McButton, I was in your EXACT position four weeks ago. I know nothing about Linux and wanted XBMC. I ended up with a NUC34010WYKH, 8gb of ram (in case I wanted to run windows on it) and a 60gb Kingston SSD drive, an Intel mini PCI slot Wireless-N/Bluetooth card and an HP MCE remote, a WD My Cloud 3TB NAS server. I'm a network engineer by trade and fully understand how to get computers connected and talking but my only exposure to Linux was setting up a Raspberry Pi Minecraft server for my daughters. Not going to lie you, not knowing anything about Linux and messing with this stuff can be a bit challenging at first but thankfully the internet is VAST and you can find what you need even if you don't what you are looking for - for the most part.
I ended up running
Generic X86 64-bit OpenELEC 3.95.6. You also need to be running version 25 of BIOS and have WAKE on LAN turned off in BIOS to avoid a problem with powering on/off your NUC with a remote.
I'd like to tell you that my install of OpenELEC XBMC onto my NUC was without incident but that wasn't the case. I'm happy with it now though and have now moved onto struggling with navigating within XBMC to get what I want when I want it and how I want it.
My first problem with my install was my remote wouldn't work. You basically have to unload the module that processes the remote signals and restart it with these two commands.
Code:
echo "#!/bin/sh" > /storage/.config/autostart.sh && chmod +x /storage/.config/autostart.sh
modprobe -r nuvoton-cir && echo "auto" | tee /sys/bus/acpi/devices/NTN0530\:00/physical_node/resources && modprobe nuvoton-cir
After you have verified that your remote works, you need to make it permanent by
SSHing to your Linux box (using
Putty.exe) and adding it to the
autostart.sh file so that the change is automatic after a reboot. I used nano to do this. So type "nano /storage/.config/autostart.sh" on the NUC command line after you SSH to it. On your install when it asks if you want to activate SSH, respond "yes"!
Generally, the newer your hardware is, the more troubles you will have with a Linux install. This is due to driver support not being up to speed yet. Stick with hardware that is a year or older and stick with popular CPUs and Graphics GPUs as they have the better support. You don't need high speed hardware to drive TV video. You just need a supported GPU (Graphics processor) and CPU, about a 1gb of ram and 16gb of SSD or HDD storage. While watching a 1080p 40mbit high def test video called "
Birds", my NUC is consuming less than 5% CPU and using 781mb of my 8gb of memory. If you plan on streaming high DEF 1080P video, make sure you connect to your NAS with an eithernet connection or are really close to your Wireless-N router. Wireless is way less than optimal for streaming high DEF content. Not saying it won't work as I got it to work but my NUC had to be real close to the wireless AP to do it.
I had some problems with my SD (standard Definition) MPEG-2 DVDs that I ripped with
MakeMKV (expect to get to know this utility really well!) It would pixelate when I played an SD movie. Turns out I had to turn off hardware acceleration for MPEG2 video content.
See my thread on OpenELEC.
And.... Your research is just now getting started. After you get your hardware all sorted out and running like you need it, you will be onto your XBMC education, your ADD-On education, your "skin" education, your video format education, your content manipulation eduction, your NAS education and so on. This really never ends. But after playing with XBMC for a couple of weeks (EVERY NIGHT), I'm starting to get comfortable with the menus and navigating within it. Get the AEON NOC Skin! If you don't know what that means, you will eventually.
Good luck and PM me or post here if you need more of my NOOB perspective. And... Once you get your Chromebook figured out and working like you want it, send me the "deets" on setting one of those up. I'd like to have one for my bedroom.