XBMC
I’ve recently purchased an Acer Revo 3610 for use as a media centre. It came with Linpus Linux pre-installed although I promptly removed this to install XBMC Live. This was very easy to install. I created a bootable USB drive from the ISO file, installed it, and it worked. There was one small issue with the sound in the menus although creating a .asoundrc file in the home directory fixed this. I bought a Windows Media Centre remote control and once that arrived, I plugged it in and it worked straight away.
Then I decided I wanted to play around with it. I thought it would be a good idea to install Xubuntu with XBMC on top so that I could have a desktop as well if I should ever need it. I thought this would be just as easy to get running; I was wrong.
Installing Xubuntu was easy enough. I made a bootable USB drive again and installed it without any problems. I had to install the proprietory drivers for the NVidia Ion graphics, there was a lot of system updates to install. The wireless network didn’t work, and still doesn’t since I don’t need it. I’ve found how to fix it just haven’t done it yet. I added the PPA for XBMC-SVN so I could get the latest builds of 10.5 rather than the released 9.11 and installing it easy. Then I noticed, I had no sound. I had connected the Revo to my TV through HDMI and getting the sound to work through it wasn’t as easy.
In XBMC Live I had just selected HDMI as my sound output, under Xubuntu I didn’t have this option at all. Googling revealed this to be a common problem with a whole host of solutions, non of which seemed to work. I ended up breaking the sound completely to the point that it wouldn’t even detect sound cards anymore and for some reason the graphics drivers were broken so I could only run in “Low graphics mode”. I gave up and reinstalled Xubuntu again to get a clean slate. It only took about 25 minutes and I figured it was probably quicker. In the end it was a post on One Eye that fixed the issue, so a big thanks there. It was quite late by this point so I was glad to get it working.
Once sound and video were working it was simple enough to get everything else set up. The remote worked as soon as I installed lirc, then I just set it to login automatically into an XBMC session. Once this was done I rebooted and it all worked.
XBMC makes for a great media centre. I’ve used it previously on an old Xbox but this newer version running on a more powerful PC with HD support and all is a lot better. I never used to use the library because it would really slowly on my Xbox but now it runs smoothly. I’d recommend XBMC to anyone who wanted a media centre. I might try out some others now that I have Xubuntu working it shouldn’t be hard to install others without messing up XBMC but it would have to be something exceptional to get me to change. I was tempted to get a TV tuner card and try out MythTV but that might have to wait for the future. It wouldn’t fit in my Revo and I don’t have a spare computer to use as the server.