[TODDXBMC]

Hello from an XBMC Newbe and looking for a helpful steer from people with more experience.

I'm in the process of building a media system for my house. The server is essentially built and running, and working on media players.

I have an old X-Box I intend to upgrade and use for XBMC in my sons playroom, but haven't quite got to tackling that one yet and more research to be done.

At the moment I'm working on the player for my Family Room. At the moment I'm experimenting with XBMC Live on an old Dell SFF machine (posted a seperate question in the XBMC Live Forum).

I like the XBMC Live format as it's easy to set up, fast to load, and I'm not having to first load an OS, then an App to get where I'm going. The permant box (whatever it is) will only be used to run XBMC.

So what are the drawbacks to XBMC Live for my purposes? Is it not being able to add drivers (question from my other thread)? Is there anything else it doesn't do?

What are the pros / cons to using Ubunutu / Linux? Is there a way to set it up in Ubunutu to load XBMC automatically? Can you enable a "sleep" mode on Ubunutu so the box would run at minimal power and wake fast into XBMC?

I can't imagine any pros to using this app on top of Windows since I dont need to run anything else on the box.. but if I'm missing something let me know. Just seems like this is a lot of overhead not required.

Any thoughts, advice, or pitfalls are appreciated. Thanks!. I'll be reading here a lot the next few days and many more to come.

[.:B:.]

I am not familiar with the internals of XBMC Live; if it operates as a real live distribution it you will be able to save settings etc. to a file somewhere, but not able to change its internals (it just uncompresses an image upon boot, just like a live CD would do).

There is a lot of excellent documentation around on how to get XBMC running on Ubuntu, and how to get Ubuntu running on x86 systems. If XBMC Live does not work out of the box I think it might be easier to install Ubuntu the regular way and adapt what is needed (this also is extensively documented).

You can always decide to run XBMC on Windows, there's nothing wrong with that. However, if it's a hobby project and you like to play around with Linux a bit, Ubuntu is definitely the distro to start with. If you see that regular Windows XP installations often use 200 MB+ plus with an empty desktop, and there's not a lot to throw out (unless you're a real pro, and unless you decide not to run firewalls/AV/the likes). Compare that with my AppleTV Linux install, which runs at well under 40 MB in runlevel 3 (just a tty (terminal), no graphical layer), and ~130 MB with XBMC running . That includes a few running services like SSH and NTP.

So if you're short on RAM, it pays to use a light Linux installation imho. Of course, if you're gonna spend the money and get a new box with a few GB of RAM, just pick the OS you're most comfortable with.

[ahmada]

Everyone is advising me against using Windows OS with an HTPC due to the fact that it does not decode HD content well. I know about the XBMC live OS but what other options are there? I was wondering which OS supports Adobe flash 10.1 beta. Specifically for an ION330 GPU

[TODDXBMC]

I am not familiar with the internals of XBMC Live; if it operates as a real live distribution it you will be able to save settings etc. to a file somewhere, but not able to change its internals (it just uncompresses an image upon boot, just like a live CD would do).

There is a lot of excellent documentation around on how to get XBMC running on Ubuntu, and how to get Ubuntu running on x86 systems. If XBMC Live does not work out of the box I think it might be easier to install Ubuntu the regular way and adapt what is needed (this also is extensively documented).

You can always decide to run XBMC on Windows, there's nothing wrong with that. However, if it's a hobby project and you like to play around with Linux a bit, Ubuntu is definitely the distro to start with. If you see that regular Windows XP installations often use 200 MB+ plus with an empty desktop, and there's not a lot to throw out (unless you're a real pro, and unless you decide not to run firewalls/AV/the likes). Compare that with my AppleTV Linux install, which runs at well under 40 MB in runlevel 3 (just a tty (terminal), no graphical layer), and ~130 MB with XBMC running . That includes a few running services like SSH and NTP.

So if you're short on RAM, it pays to use a light Linux installation imho. Of course, if you're gonna spend the money and get a new box with a few GB of RAM, just pick the OS you're most comfortable with.

I installed XBMC on Windows XP on this test box today. It ran, but the video stalled several times during a movie playback, which it never does running XBMC Live off a thumb drive.

So I dumped XP and installed UBUNUTU 9.10. I don't use it for anything else so no loss. However, ran into two issues:

1. I can't access back to my shared folders on one of the other computers, where XBMC is stored (as well as all my media). It sees my windows network but when I try to access I get an "failed to retrieve sharelist from server." Looks like I'm going to have to start learning UBUNUTU.

2. I still cannot see any graphics over 800 x 600 which must be a driver issue. This is an onboard graphics Intel 910GL chipset (I think). It's really old, and no linux drivers on the dell website. Again I'm sure a lot of this is my ingnorace on anything Linux/Ubunutu based.

I'll be digging through online documentation, but any pointers are helpful.

[.:B:.]

I can't help you with the Windows network shares, but you need to have Samba support on Ubuntu (it's not Ubunutu btw ;-)) for it. Normally you have it out of the box; I don't have any experience with Samba, so I can't give you any info on that. Your best bet is to google the error or join #xbmc-linux on IRC, there are quite some helpful people around that should be able to see you through it.

As for your graphics driver, run xrandr in a terminal, it will print all possible resolutions and the active one will be marked with an asterisk (*). Use this command to check what driver X is using:

Code:

[stijn@hermes ~]$ grep -i drv /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/synaptics_drv.so

The first line you see here is the Intel driver (xf86-video-intel is the package name normally). You should have something similar. Check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf for possible resolutions too, especially if xrandr shows your current resolution to be the maximum one. If necessary you'll have to edit xorg.conf and add the resolutions you think your chip supports (and hopefully does).

This link might interest you: http://mohsinhijazee.wordpress.com/2009/...ontroller/

And I repeat: don't be afraid to google ;-).

[TODDXBMC]

As for your graphics driver, run xrandr in a terminal, it will print all possible resolutions and the active one will be marked with an asterisk (*). Use this command to check what driver X is using:

Code:

[stijn@hermes ~]$ grep -i drv /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/synaptics_drv.so

The first line you see here is the Intel driver (xf86-video-intel is the package name normally). You should have something similar. Check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf for possible resolutions too, especially if xrandr shows your current resolution to be the maximum one. If necessary you'll have to edit xorg.conf and add the resolutions you think your chip supports (and hopefully does).

This link might interest you: http://mohsinhijazee.wordpress.com/2009/...ontroller/

And I repeat: don't be afraid to google ;-).

I have had a few busy days at work this week, but will be on this tonight and let you know how it goes. The link looks to have exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks Much.