Archive:Sane Ubuntu XBMC Setup

REDIRECT HOW-TO:Install Kodi for Linux

A basic but sane way of building an XBMC install on top of Ubuntu

What you will need

* one Ubuntu desktop install. [[1]]

Step One - Acquiring Ubuntu

First of all, you will need to download the latest released version of ubuntu, for our install we are going to use the desktop version of Ubuntu so that we have a fully working system, before we configure it for XBMC use. Go to [2] and download either the 32-bit or 64-bit version of ubuntu, depending on what architecture your target hardware is. Once you have the .iso you'll either need to install it to a usb pen drive or on a CD, either is fine but out of scope for this tutorial. Once you have Ubuntu burnt to a USB stick or CD, pop it in your target hardware and boot it up! Install Ubuntu just using the default options for everything, unless you have a reason not to. Although make sure to give yourself a unique username and strong password.

Step Two - Acquiring XBMC

Installing XBMC is fairly simple, type the following command into a terminal

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc

This will add the latest release of xbmc to your repository list, if you are feeling somewhat adventurous you add the latest unreleased version with the following command

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc-svn

Once you have the repository of your choice installed you can go ahead and update the system, then install xbmc

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc

Step Two and a half

At this point you may wish to make sure you have your graphics drivers installed. head to System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers - This will present a nice interface for grabbing the right hardware drivers that you may need for your machine, especially Nvidia users.

You may also want to take this opportunity to test that xbmc is working. you can launch it from the Applications -> Sound and Video menu.

Step Three, some light pruning

One of the problems with starting from a desktop install of Ubuntu is that you have some rather large applications installed. Whilst leaving them installed won't cause any problems, we don't need them and removing them will reduce the size of updates. So go to Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center (bottom of the menu) and remove anything from the Installed Applications that you feel you don't need. Of note would be OpenOffice.

Step Four - Set up an XBMC login session

Here is where things get more complicated, so lets make it easy. What we want to achieve is an install that boots straight into xbmc when you start the machine up. To set about achieving that we are going to create a separate user to log into and a separate XBMC session.

Use the Users and Groups tool in System -> Administration to create a new user, make its name xbmc. it will then ask you for a password, Make note of the "Don't ask for password on login" box, but for now, leave it unchecked. We now have our xbmc user.

Now we need to build a session for xbmc so that we can log directly into that. Create a file called xbmcGDM that contains the following and place it in your home directory - this is the small script that will launch our xbmc instance.

#!/bin/bash
pulseaudio --start ;
xbmc

now run this command - it will copy that file to the place it needs to be.

chmod +x xbmcGDM; sudo mv ~/xbmcGDM /usr/bin/xbmcGDM

After we have that in the correct place, we can create our session. create a new file in your home directory and call it xbmc.desktop, make sure it contains the following

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=XBMC
Comment=XB media center
Exec=/usr/bin/xbmcGDM
Icon=
Type=Application

now run the following command, again to get this file to the correct place

sudo mv ~/xbmc.desktop /usr/share/xsessions/xbmc.desktop

Great, we now have an XBMC session. lets test it out. log out of your current user and select the XBMC user to log into. however don't log into it yet! at the bottom of the screen is a check-box with your current session in it, it should say Gnome. change that to xbmc. now put in your password and log in. you should start directly into xbmc. Log out again by selecting the quit option in XBMC.

• Note, you can also log into the gnome xbmc user session, if you need to make any tweaks like setting the audio output to HDMI audio - just make sure to set it back to the xbmc session before following the next step.

Step Five - Wrap up

Now finally all that there is left to do is make sure that we are auto-logging into the xbmc session. so log back into the gnome session of your root user. go to system -> administration Login Screen. Unlock the interface and use the Log in as <username> automatically radio item to set the auto-login to the xbmc user.

Congratulations, you now have XBMC auto-starting on your ubuntu install :-)