Beulbek

Installling XBMC on an Ubuntu based Mediacenter

Now that I have got the Harmony working, I am reviewing my installation. Having seen some screenshots of XBMC, especially the Aeon Theme, I became enthousiastic immediately. I thought it was an Xbox-only programme, but it’s much more than that: packages are available for Mac, Linux and Windows. Here’s a report of the tries: although they have Ubuntu packages available, it appeared quite hard to install. Read along to find the key issue.

I first tried installing XBMC via a tutorial, found at Ubuntuforums. Start with  adding the sources for the PPA ( Personal Package Archive) to my sources.list :

sudo echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main" >> /etc/apt/sources/list
sudo echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

and install the programme via an apt-get install xbmc. Unfortunately, I encountered an error stating:

/usr/share/xbmc/xbmc-xrandr: cannot find mode 0x5f

Looking at the xbmc-xrandr, I found it filled with different screen resolutions. I figured xbmc couldn’t handle my resolution so I tried some other resolutions, but that didn’t make any difference. Only thing changed was the code in the error, pointing to the resolution. I therefore figured the packages did not do it for me.

Next try: install via SVN.  A tutorial is given at the official XBMC wiki. This gave me an error in SVN: <code>error /home/jaap/.subversion/config: Option expected</code> Glas to see this was easily solved by deleting spaces in the options file: every line that contains an option and is not commented out, should be edited not to start with a space.  Courtesy routeur01.

I chose make -j2 because I have two cores.

Being lazy, I copy-pasted the command for apt-get into a text file that i ran afterwards. This took care of installing all needed packages:

sudo apt-get install make g++-4.1 gcc-4.1 libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev libfribidi0 libfribidi-dev liblzo1 liblzo-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev libogg-dev libasound2-dev python-sqlite libglew1.5 libglew1.5-dev libcurl3-dev g++ gawk x11proto-xinerama-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev pmount libmad0-dev libtre-dev libogg-dev libvorbis-dev libmysqlclient15-dev libhal1 libhal-dev libhal-storage1 libhal-storage-dev libpcre3-dev subversion libjasper-dev libjasper1 libfontconfig-dev libbz2-dev libboost-dev libtool nasm libfaac-dev libenca-dev automake cmake libxt-dev libxmu-dev gperf unzip libpng12-dev libjpeg62-dev bison libpulse-dev

Originally, the lib-stretch-dev was needed also but apt-get told me it couldn’t be found. I deleted it from the command ant that did not give me any errors. Now, configure and make:

 ./configure
 make -j2
 sudo make install

The make ended with an error 2:

[dvdpcodecs] Error 2.
Done! You can run XBMC with the command 'xbmc'.

But, running the program gave me a another Segmentation fault.

At this point, I was done with it. I tried multiple options to get the program working but it all did not work. Reading wiki’s and Ubuntuforums, I saw an option I didn’t now I had enabled. The key:

disable compiz

So, concluding, installing XBMC on ubuntu:

1. Add the repositories
2. Disable compiz: apt-get --remove compiz compiz-*
3. Install xbmc: apt-get install xbmc

Voila, you’re done!

Resources

I “borrowed” the second image from Lifehacker.com.au. Gallery of the Aeon theme is found here.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 17:21 and is filed under apt-get, Blog, HTPC, Mediacenter, Plugins, Ubuntu, XBMC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.