Details about the release:

• Based on Ubuntu Jaunty

• NVIDIA drivers: 180.44 (VDPAU included on supported GPUs)

• ATI/AMD drivers: Catalyst 9.4

• Natively supports MCEUSB remotes

• Uses duduke’s great “black” usplash theme

• New installer script that allows building of XBMC Live USB bootable disks from any Ubuntu-based system without the need of burning a CD and booting from it.

• New boot script automatically increasing the system audio volume

• New install to HDD method: the installer creates a standard Ubuntu system on the target disk (a kind of XBMCbuntu…)

Finally, the XBMC repositories sources are already configured and topfs2’s cool script “Aptitude” is included, so updating XBMC to follow the new releases will hopefully be easy!

As in the previous releases I need to anticipate that NVIDIA and ATI/AMD users may have to struggle to have a working setup, but that’s a limitation of the restricted drivers not being tolerant interms of configuration files. Les’t s hope that this new release will allow an higher number of success stories.

Details about the release:

• Based on Ubuntu Jaunty

• NVIDIA drivers: 180.44 (VDPAU included)

• ATI/AMD drivers: Catalyst 9.4

• Natively supports MCEUSB remotes

• New installer script that allows building of XBMC Live USB bootable disks from any Ubuntu-based system without the need of burning a CD and booting from it.

• New boot script automatically increasing the system audio volume

Finally, the XBMC repositories sources are already configured and the cool script “Aptitude” is included, so updating XBMC to follow the new releases will hopefully be easy – check your disk space!

This BETA release has to be considered as a total fresh start, since not only it is based on Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10.2), but also because I used a fresh, updated installation of the build tool.

It also marks the start to a new approach: I have created some pages in the XBMC Wiki where both the build process and the configuration process are briefly described, and I am looking forward to users’ contributions in these pages so that both the quality and the completeness of the documents could increase. Not to mention omissisions and mistakes that this new beta release will carry in.

I need to stress the fact that this release was not tested in all details, and issues may arise here and there. However, identifying issues is the main cause I’m releasing it in the public: with help of all of you we may end up with something that barely works (sarcasm here…).

I can anticipate that NVIDIA and ATI/AMD users may have to struggle to have a working setup, as in the previous releases, but that’s a limitation of the restricted drivers not being tolerant interms of configuration files. Les’t s hope that the newer releases will allow an higher number of success stories.

Details about the release:

• NVIDIA drivers: 180.29

• ATI/AMD drivers: Catalyst 9.1

• Natively supports MCEUSB remotes

• New installer script that allows building of XBMC Live USB bootable disks from any Ubuntu-based system without the need of burning a CD and booting from it.

Finally, the SVN repositories sources are already configured, so updating XBMC to follow the bleeding edge will hopefully be easy – check your disk space!

Wiki references:

Building the ISO image – Configuring XBMC Live – Building restricted drivers for XBMC Live

• ATI/AMD Catalyst 8.9
• unified hard disk/USB flash disk installer; new in this version is the hard disk installation:
  

  - it creates three partitions on the hard disk (boot, fat32 – swap – media, ext3)
  - it disables the “root” login (as per Ubuntu standards)
  - it asks for the reset of the “xbmc” password

• the XBMC profile (userdata, skins, settings, etc) is saved onto the root of the USB flash disk in a directory “dotXBMC” so that it should be easier to add skins and backup settings and library databases
• the XBMC log file is saved onto the root of the USB flash disk to ease debugging

Enjoy, and come to the forums to provide feedback!

In that context I had the pleasure to present XBMC to a mainly non-technical audience, nonetheless very interested in hearing and seeing something that was totally unexpected and “futuristic” for some aspects.

Nice experience, many thanks to the Telematics Freedom Foundation for their support.

Main changes since last release:

* updated NVIDIA drivers, 177.78
* enhanced XBMC Live creator, with bug fixes and new functionality such as install to hard disk. WARNING: THE CHOSEN DISK (HARD DISK or FLASH DISK) WILL BE COMPLETELY ERASED! I say it again:WARNING: THE CHOSEN DISK (HARD DISK or FLASH DISK) WILL BE COMPLETELY ERASED!

Updated AMD/ATI drivers could not get through this time, they will be ready for next release – or even earlier than that as a separate package.

Oh yes, new bugs, too! Tell us about them in the forums!

Due to the recent surge of downloads I see the need to reveal some details of the next release that will come out in June:

• XBMC will be upgradeable via the official XBMC PPAs!
• it will automount all local hard disk partition
• it will support writing to NTFS via NTFS-3G
• it will include a boot menu allowing to choose the GPU type among the supported ones – no need to rename files on the USB disk
• it will include sshd by default to ease debugging and updates.
• it will support removable media auto-mounting via XBMC build-in capabilities

Don’t hold your breath, the release date is not set yet!

Cheers

Sorry about that, I haven’t been able to blog about any updates in a while, someone came wrong with the system.
Hopefully I can keep you all up to date on my workings.
Stay tuned for the next release!

In the meanwhile keep in mind that these instructions cover LiveXBMC-V1 and are missing some bits here and there when referring to V2 (V2 was not released at that time)!
However, the image creation processes steps still apply. ]]> http://xbmc.org/lcapriotti/2008/05/30/long-time-no-post/feed/ 0 http://xbmc.org/lcapriotti/2008/02/07/create-bootable-usb-disk-on-windows-manually/ http://xbmc.org/lcapriotti/2008/02/07/create-bootable-usb-disk-on-windows-manually/#comments Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:00:54 +0000 lcapriotti http://xbmc.org/lcapriotti/?p=9

I have been experimenting with the creation of bootable flash disk under Windows since it is not a trivial process and I have not identified a simple and effective tool doing the job.
There may be several variants, but this one works and it’s easy to describe.
You must be logged as local administrator to perform these steps.

Needed tools

• aefdisk32 – cmd-line partitioning tools. Get it from here. Note that this is needed under XP only, since diskpart in Vista supports removable disks.
• syslinux for win32. Get the last version from kernel.org
• WinImage. To extract the files form the original LiveXBMC image. Get it from its Home page.

Step 1. Identify the disk with aefdisk32

Since you may not want to erase your hard drive you need to be careful with this: using

aefdisk32 n /allsize

where n=1,2 …max number of disks you have, find the disk number related to the USB flash disk by matching the disk capacity. In the following example 2 is such a number.

Step 2. Erase the disk, create a primary FAT partition and make it active and bootable

Using aefdisk32 this is all in one single instruction:

aefdisk32.exe 2 /delall /pri:0:c /activate:1 /mbr

Using DISKPART on Vista:

List disk
select disk 1
clean 
create partition primary 
select partition 1 
active 
format fs=fat32 
assign 
exit

Step 3. Format the partition
If aefdisk32 has been used for step 2, the following is needed to format the partition:

format X: /fs:fat

Change X to the letter that your system has assigned to your removable disk!

Vista users don’t need to do it since DISKPART has already done it.

Step 4. Put syslinux on the flash disk

syslinux -f X:

Change X to the letter that your system has assigned to your removable disk!

Step 5. Extract LiveXBMC files

Using WinImage, extract the following files from the LiveXBMC image:

boot.msg
ext3fs.img
initrd0.img
rootfs.img
syslinux.cfg
vmlinuz

and save them on the flash disk.

That’s it. You are now ready to boot from the USB disk into LiveXBMC.

A forum member, Duduke, kindly provided a killer usplash theme for LiveXBMC.

Get the source package from Sourceforge! ]]> http://xbmc.org/lcapriotti/2008/02/07/livexbmc-usplash-theme/feed/ 0