For those who are looking for a confirmation that a Asus Chromebox could be turned into a fine HTPC, this is a copy of a post I have made on xbmchub forum yesterday:
I have received my Asus Chromebox (MSRP 179$USD) a few days ago and I just finished to setup it up into a fully functionnal HTPC with XBMC and all the add-ons.
I succeed after spending long hours trying differents kind of setup to finally get one where everything was working flawlessly on it. I mean EVRYTHING...and the setup that I have on it right now is rock solid. Ubuntu is very fast and responsive. XBMC, the graphic driver and HDMI (with sound working on the same cable) are working fine.
It is at least a 500-600% increase in performance and stability (so far) over my previous OUYA setup running SPMC. Thanks to the Haswell architecture. I'm 100% satisfied...
FYI I'm running the chromebox with the stock hardware (the cheapest model: Celeron + 2GB RAM, 16GB SSD) and the performance are perfectly fine for HTPC needs and XBMC. I only add a external USB HDD to get more storage for my data.
However, not all kind of Linux distros are possible at this time for the chromebox. This is due to a USB3/firmware/legacyBIOS issue. This will likely get fixed in a near future but a direct OpenElec installation is not possible atm. The only setup that has worked without issues for me with this machine was a full installation of ubuntu with XBMC.
Important: Forget the popular crouton script for now. You must use chrubuntu on it to get the full potentiel of the box and you must absolutely install Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy) to get the full Intel drivers support. This is the instructions that I have followed to get my current installation (minus the hardware upgrade part in my case):
http://www.willispickering.com/content/u...and-ubuntu
Cheers!
By the way, I now have a OUYA for sale...