[LINUX] HOW-TO make a standard Ubuntu installation into 'XBMCbuntu' set-top-box style

Although XBMC Live is really only a customized standard Ubuntu system when installed on a fixed disk in "normal mode", there are many situations in which a complete build may provide the extra flexibility that a full standard installation is capable of.

For this purpose I drafted a first version of this HOW-TO, a basic description guide of the process required to build what I call "XBMCbuntu", a standard Ubuntu installation on fixed disk that has the 'set-top-box' appliance look and feel that IMHO is a must for all production style HTPC setups.

The article describes the basic steps required for the build, and does not go into details on special aspects of the system setup that are subject to vary depending on the actual hardware used. This is on purpose, and any additional instructions in this regard must be written in separate wiki pages that I will later review and link from and to the main article.

Note! Please help this HOW-TO grow in completeness, consistency, and accuracy!

Wow thx for this. Now Install miminal Ubuntu officially supported

Great to see a minimal install guide return. My only criticism is one package (xbmc-live). The old(previous guide) was deemed dangerous due to blindly leading users to perform unsafe actions/downloads with wget with little to no documentation to its actual function. Is this not what you are asking us to do by installing xbmc-live?
Could you explain exactly what this package is doing to our systems?

Apart from that, seems to be a great guide. I may try it out this weekend.

Cheers

My previous post is by no means meant to be taken as an attack on this new guide. Im only trying to offer help/thoughts/opinion. A slightly expanded description on what the xbmc-live package is doing would suffice.

Zepp

Zeppstar Wrote:Great to see a minimal install guide return. My only criticism is one package (xbmc-live). The old(previous guide) was deemed dangerous due to blindly leading users to perform unsafe actions/downloads with wget with little to no documentation to its actual function. Is this not what you are asking us to do by installing xbmc-live?
Could you explain exactly what this package is doing to our systems?

Apart from that, seems to be a great guide. I may try it out this weekend.

Cheers

XBMC Live package is a helper written by luigi and is a script that can for instance mount hdds. So its not unsafe, its a vital part of XBMC Live.

Also noteworthy is that making these installation is far from "supported" it's how-to for those insisting on doing it, or for those that wants to know how XBMC Live is built. What is supported is using either plain Ubuntu (the simple guide) or to install XBMC Live, everything else the person doing it is on it's own.

The old guide was very good for those that are used to linux, and a great well of information about how to update different subsystems, however it was never suited for newcommers, which insisted on using the guide which was unfortuanate and most hit a roadblock and tried to get help on irc when it more often than not was user issues, or hardware specific issues which they wasn't meant to fix.

Thats why this guide is to take it's place, it rarely use own compiled stuff and relies much more on deb's which is far easier to handle for anyone.

Cheers,
Tobias.

Zeppstar Wrote:Could you explain exactly what this package is doing to our systems?

Fair enough: it can be easily verified that the deb contains the following scripts (all taken from the XBMC SVN, no binaries):

/etc/init.d/xbmc-live: startx X and XBMC automatically at login (among others)
/usr/bin/installXBMC.py: XBMC Live installer
/usr/bin/setAlsaVolumes.py: helper script increasing audio levels
/usr/bin/diskmounter: helper script mounting existing fixed disk partitions

adds an user "xbmc" belonging to the proper groups, and assigns power management and removable media grants.

The same packages are part of the new XBMC Live.

Lately I've been setting up my media centre with a minimal XFCE and firefox so I can drop out of xbmc to web surf. Using the startup programs in XFCE, i've seen a negligible increase in startup time for xbmc and you can barely notice that XFCE has been loaded. Providing this information about how xbmc-live starts things up may assist other people modify their system to suit their needs.

Thanks

Hi,

When I try to do a apt-get update i receive this error..

I've tried this solution also but without success.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1122802

what could be wrong

MartijnKooi Wrote:Hi,

When I try to do a apt-get update i receive this error..

PHP Code:

W: GPG error: [url]http://ppa.launchpad.net[/url] jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A956EB81318C7509
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
[email]xbmc@solonview:/etc/apt/sources.list[/email].d$ 


I've tried this solution also but without success.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1122802

what could be wrong

I got same error while installing, but XBMC runs fines.

Its looking for a key for the add-ons deb the tutorial tells you to add to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xbmc.org.list - deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xbmc-addons/ppa/ubuntu/ jaunty main

Running will import the key as per https://launchpad.net/~xbmc-addons/+archive/ppa

On another note, i can't believe olympia's guide has been removed completly. It should be archived or stickied somewhere - i learnt so much from his guide, even as a newb.....infact, especially because i'm a newb. Each step stated what it's intention was and was just a case of copy pasting to a term window, how simple can ya get. This guide (even though i'm grateful for people spending time on doing them) is missing stuff like how to get the temps displaying in xbmc or power management for instance.

I just can't see that much difference between the two guides - people are still going to have problems and support is still going to be needed but i've always thought it's the users and site mods/admins that provide support not the devs.

Again this isn't a dig at anyone and especially not towards l.capriotti - thank-you so much for spending your own tme on providing guides like this, i wouldn't be so happy with my htpc if it wasn't for people like you and olympia.