[Packgrog]

My XBox cable died this weekend, and until I can get ahold of a replacement cable and make sure the power supply in my v1.0 XBox is in decent enough condition to continue working, I've hooked up my old Compaq N410c to my 35" standard def beast to keep me from going through XBMC withdrawal!

I've tried repurposing the thing multiple times, but previous iterations of XBMC ran like a pig on this extremely outdated hardware. I was surprised to discover that version 10 of XBMC runs quite admirably, at least on Windows XP. I've tried running the LiveCD and it just won't load X. It keeps getting stuck in some kind of dependency loop. I may try installing to a USB stick soon to see if that might work better somehow (and would at least work nicely with my other, not-as-outdated laptop).

Anyone else ever tried using one of these things?

[Packgrog]

Well, it seems that for this particular hardware, XBMC on Windows XP is really the only option. It works relatively well, thanks to Direct3D support, though the interface does hang a bit at times, especially when trying to exit the app. That might just be a limitation of the RAM (only 512MB), but it does seem strange that the CPU spikes to 100% for several minutes when just trying to shut the app down. Weird.

Trying to run XBMC Live from either the CD or a USB key was a complete failure. This may be more of a failure of the underlying Ubuntu system than anything. It just can't launch X11, and keeps dropping back to the login prompt. Curiously even after logging in at the command prompt, it still keeps trying to re-launch X. Oh well.

I can probably hack the Windows XP instance to strip everything else out, auto-login, and immediately launch XBMC. It's not ideal, and it takes a long time to launch, but it's better than nothing.