[xbmcreallyrocks]

I'm trying to start xbmc on Gentoo on a Pandaboard ES and I get:

Code:

ERROR: Unable to create GUI. Exiting.

I can't use the proprietary Pandabord video drivers because they don't work with the latest versions of many packages so I'm using the omapfb video drivers. Should I be able to start xbmc?

[kogepathic]

Hi xbmcreallyrocks,

You cannot run XBMC using the omapfb drivers. AFAIK the Pandaboard doesn't have armhf supported graphics drivers yet, so you'll have to run armel (Ubuntu 12.04 or older) or Linaro's Android image to be able to use XBMC on the Pandaboard.

[wally_666]

so you'll have to run armel (Ubuntu 12.04 or older)

But don't expect much these were barely able to run Lubuntu when I was playing with the Pandaboard ES and 12.04. There are (were) drivers in a TIOmap PPA that were much faster but system stability suffered. Since TI disbanded their Omap group shortly thereafter, I doubt things are any better now or ever will be. My Pandaboard ES collects dust

I hear XBMC for Android isn't quite up to snuff yet, but I found the Android image I tried was a bit better on the Pandaboard ES than Lubuntu, but was not really useful to me. The Pandaboard ES has so far been my greatest Linux disappointment.

[wally_666]

I've basically given up on the Pandaboard, but I did stumble upon this unsupported XBMC Geexbox 3.1 version:

http://download.geexbox.org/unsupported/...ard.tar.xz

No idea of how it works, if you try please post a follow-up here of the results, maybe I can be motivated to dust mine off, but my Google-Fu doesn't find much about the Pandaboard after 2013.

[wally_666]

I got curious and tried the GeeXboX unsupported build. It sort of works, I can't get audio, but some video files will play, it may only play audio over HDMI.

I had an 8GB SD card with boot and rootfs partitions set up from other Pandaboard trials, so it was easy.

1) Erase the contents of the SD card boot partition

2) Download and unpack: http://download.geexbox.org/unsupported/...ard.tar.xz

3) cd geexbox-flat-devel-20140628-r894b43a.pandaboard and copy the contents of the boot directory to the SD card boot partition, I used Nautilus drag and drop.

4) format the SD card rootfs ext4 and mount it, I made the label be Pandaboard this time.

5) as root cd to where you have the downloaded *.xz file:
tar xfp geexbox-devel-20140628-r894b43a.pandaboard.tar.xz -C /media/Pandaboard

6) Unfortunately this creates /media/Pandaboard/geexbox-flat-devel-20140628-r894b43a.pandaboard/ so you need to move everything in this folder up one level. I did gksu nautilus and navigated to inside /media/Pandaboard/geexbox-flat-devel-20140628-r894b43a.pandaboard, enabled show hidden files, did Ctrl-A to select everything, Ctrl-X to cut, and navigated up to /media/Pandaboard and did Ctrl-V to paste.

7) Unmount the SD card and boot it in the Pandaboard.

Good Luck!

Maybe poking around this system will give you clues as to the bits you'll need to build on Gentoo. This does seem to be the best working GUI I've seen yet on my Pandaboard ES.