Adding the Repo and installing XBMC:

wget http://download.obs.maemo.org/home%3a/arfoll/MeeGo_1.0_Core/home%3aarfoll.repo
sudo mv home\:arfoll.repo /etc/yum.repos.d

Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/home\:arfoll.repo, and set gpgcheck to 0. (The Maemo community OBS seems to enable this but it doesn't sign the packages it builds!)

sudo yum install xbmc

Can't really make it easier than that now can I?

Note: I've only tested this on meego 1.0 netbook with all the latest updates as of 14th august. Please tell me if anything goes wrong in your install.

Thanks to the people on the #meego channel and to the maemo community for making their very nice community OBS available to all meego x86 people.

XBMC r33163 is now available in the repositories!

The current XBMC build is SVN (dharma branch) r32806, which isn't the latest but it's fairly stable. I will move to newer ones eventually but my aim is not to update this every day. The dependancies will probably not be updated so long as the OBS keeps compiling them fine If you have a newer package that works and compiles in meego i'd be glad to replace one of my older ones though!

There is no MythTV support in this XBMC version, as I remove all mysql dependancies using a patch. If anyone really wants to do this, I can probably renenable my mysql/perl packages. I also have a small patch to add some meego specific stuff and fix a libfaad error - see this forum post.

Add as xbmc.rpmlintrc in your working directory:

#remove all rpmlint output
addFilter(".*")

Then just add and commit

osc add xbmc.rpmlintrc
osc commit

This example is very brutal. Here is a link to the opensuse wiki which will show you what the filters are so you can disable just the rules that annoy you.

For example in my package the nice way of doing this would be to add this. See some examples in the heartbeat opensuse package.

addFilter("arch-dependent-file-in-usr-share /usr/share/xbmc/Python24.zip")

This should work for a stock meego 1.0 netbook image. I tested it on a Samsung NC10 with 2GB of ram.

A few optional things that could be nice
An openssh server might be useful, full vim, wget and synergy (keyboard sharing client/server)

sudo yum install -y vim openssh-server wget synergy

My howto will use wget.

Installing dependancies from Meego repos
Here goes the big part. The last 15 or so dependancies may not all be required. However I didn't want to go all the way through them again. If you do it please send me an email

sudo yum install -y boost-devel glew-devel libsamplerate-devel libogg-devel bzip2-devel zip lzo-devel fribidi-devel sqlite-devel pcre-devel flac-devel libsmbclient-devel libtalloc samba-winbind gperf libXau-devel libvorbis-devel openssl-devel SDL-devel alsa-lib-devel alsa-plugins-pulseaudio jasper-devel jasper-libs libtiff-devel SDL_image-devel libXtst-devel libXmu-devel libcurl-devel libmp4v2-devel fontconfig-devel libpng-devel SDL_mixer-devel libXinerama-devel libXi-devel avahi-devel libcom_err-devel e2fsprogs-devel python-devel cppunit-devel freeglut-devel perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker perl-ExtUtils-CBuilder libXxf86vm-devel mikmod-devel esound-devel expat-devel dbus-devel dbus-glib-devel libblkid-devel dos2unix libsysfs-devel glib2-devel libXv-devel ncurses-devel readline-devel doxygen udisks-devel

Installing dependancies from here
You don't need to install the HAL package since revision 29991. Meego provides udisks and udisks-devel. Thanks openelec.tv for pointing this out!
Warning : my mysql package is probably a little different as I got rid of some dependancies
Warning : my lame package does not include mp3x as it needed gtk+-devel and I have better things to do
If you want to save some space the debuginfo and doc packages are not needed. Also only the main mysql package and it's dependancies are needed.

My webserver is getting hammered so please be nice and use this google docs link to download the dependancies. Below are the sha1sum and md5sum for the file.

[brendan@madeouk]$ sha1sum XBMC_deps_rpms.tar.gz
2cbe584ddc418c1f177707e2a3baef89bda42928 XBMC_deps_rpms.tar.gz
[brendan@madeouk]$ md5sum XBMC_deps_rpms.tar.gz
0f9c094fa8ec20022989965b5642cc1a XBMC_deps_rpms.tar.gz

wget http://www.madeo.co.uk/files/XBMC_deps_rpms.tar.gz
tar xzvf XBMC_deps_rpms.tar.gz
cd i586
rm hal-*
sudo rpm -ivh *

Getting XBMC and compiling/installing
Feel free to use a different version, the latest wouldn't compile for me so I took what my Acer Revo was currently running... This will take a few hours on an Atom 270 without distcc.
Warning: You'll need to use another computer to grab the xbmc sources since SVN isn't in the meego repos and I havent built an RPM for it. Maybe later!

svn co -r30739 https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk/ xbmc
cd xbmc/
./bootstrap
./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-vdpau --disable-dvdcss --disable-hal
make -j2
make install

That's all! Hopefully it works for you.
Notice the windowmanager will mess things up if your mouse is in the top part of the screen. Disable the mouse in XBMC or just run a different WM like openbox.

First off we must remember the O2 joggler uses the 'Poulsbo' or US15W chipset from Intel which is basically very badly supported software-wise in linux. We need to use the Intel proprietary IEGD driver to get any kind of openGL acceleration. Because of this, and the fact I did not have enough time to make it work nicely in Arch Linux nor Meego, I went for a prebuilt Ubuntu image for the joggler.

I used disca's 1.3 build which requires a 4GB USB stick. Follow the instructions here to install it to your usb stick using dd or other.

Open the joggler to fit your USB flash drive (or very cheap SSD!)
This is not essential, however it leaves an empty USB port (to use with a USB sound card!) and makes the device look much neater. However you may want to leave that till the last minute. Also do not do this if you love Wifi. If you want wifi, buy a USB hub.

Open the joggler - this is actually really easy - just carefully take away the sticker on the bottom of the device. Unscrew the 4 small screws, and just pull. There are plastic 'clips' on either side and two on the top. This should not be too hard to do. Here is a youtube video if you are still worried.

Remove the Wifi card. This required me to take off two bits of tape, and pull away at the foam holding it in place a little. Then just place your USB stick inside. After all is done, close it up and boot. Bootup is actually faster than the original openpeak software! Once booted, an SSH server is in place (user: joggler, password: joggler) so I would ignore the onscreen keyboard and everything else.

Installing XBMC
I chose to go with an SVN build of XBMC, but feel free to get a stable build, there should be no difference. I shamelessely took the instructions from this blog. I'll make it quicker and up to date for Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic koala)

Add the following repository to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-svn/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-svn/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

Import the key from the PPA, update our local database and install xbmc.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 64234534
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc

We just need to launch XBMC once, and then set it to windowed mode using a USB keyboard or synergy - Settings -> System -> Video Output -> Resolution.

Installing and configuring openbox
You'll need a window manager in order to be able to start XBMC in non fullscreen mode to get the mouse emulating touchscreen to work. This is a little annoying but it's the easiest workaround (and only) I could find. Openbox was used because I'm (a little) familiar with it, otherwise this can work in gnome or anything else you want as long as you manage to take the decors and borders off completely.

sudo apt-get install openbox
mkdir ~/.config/openbox
cp /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml ~/.config/openbox
vi ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml

You'll want to remove everything between the "applications" xml tags and insert something like this.

<applications>
        <application name="*">
                <decor>no</decor>
                <shade>no</shade>
                <maximized>true</maximized>
        </application>
</applications>

vi ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh

You'll want to use something like this to autostart XBMC. I also autostart a synergy client so I can use the mouse and keyboard from my desktop PC. If you don't know this great piece of software go take a look at their homepage.

(sleep 3s && xbmc) &
(sleep 3s && synergyc holm) &

To get openbox to become the default choice, I got lazy. Just login to gnome, log out, then choose the openbox session at the GDM login. This will make it your default choice. I'm too used to having .xinitrc being so easy in Arch Linux, and after a lot of searching could not find an easy way to do it in ubuntu. If anyone knows of a way please tell me!

Fixing the XBMC skin (SVN version only)
If you have launched XBMC and are using the SVN version, then you'll notice a little graphical corruption. This is because the US15W in the joggler can't handle some of the unpacked textures that ship with the SVN builds. This fix was quite hard to find, but look here if you are interested in why this is this exact problem exists.

It's actually quite a simple fix (i'm going to assume you don't want to install SVN on the joggler):

svn co http://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/branches/9.11_Camelot/skin/Confluence
mv Confluence Confluence_stable
scp -r Confluence_stable joggler@joggler:.xbmc/skin/

Then just change the skin to Confluence_stable in Settings->Appearance->Skin

Ok all is done! Now mount some music/video using some NFS/SMB shares and you're good to go! Also check out UPNP if like me you have other XBMC HTPCs around, it's very impressive if a little worrying. To make it a nice setup and not just an experiment, I use a USB soundcard to be able to have a good sound quality. Otherwise the joggler speakers and headphone jack are terrible. I use an old Edirol UA-1EX that I had lying about. Anything using the snd-usb-audio module in linux should work very well.

Notice, some things are impossible to do with just touchscreen in confluence. I'd recommend having a go with Confluence Touch! skin. But there are quite a few different ones. So far I haven't found one I really like.

Fixing sound playback
This is a problem with XBMC and lots of audio sound cards. Basically the audio gets garbled as the sound buffer runs out of memory. I've had this on my acer revo and my O2 joggler with the external soundcard (I bet the problem is the same on the internal speakers). The easy fix is to use pulseaudio (which has a massive buffer). If you're using Gnome on the joggler ubuntu build then it will work. But using only openbox you'll need to start pulseaudio. Just add this to your autostart.sh

(sleep 1s && pulse-session) &

You'll have to make sure that your XBMC audio playback device is set to your default Pulseaudio sound card. gnome-volume-controller will help you set a default card.

Making Confluence faster
You'll notice the confluence skin is a little slow at displaying images. So i just resized and croped them all to the right size for the joggler (800x480). I also replaced the default music one and changed the apple to a tux... (i'm not even sure where that one gets displayed!). Grab the .tar.gz here. You'll have to extract it in the backgrounds folder in the confluence skin folder. My advice is to copy the confluence skin folder from '/usr/share/xbmc/skin/Confluence' to '~/.xbmc/skin/ConfluenceSmall'.

The S3115GM2N has a measly 8MB for the tiny Aspeed AST2050 graphics card, 4 usb ports (two at the back, two on the board), 4 sata ports (although one is so stupidly placed I don't know how you would use it...). The only downside of the board seems to be the maximum of 2GB of RAM, using SODIMM sticks, unlike the D510 board from intel which takes one stick of up to 4GB of normal DDR2. The board is cerified to work on RHEL5.2 and RHEL5.4 in both 64bit and 32bit.

The board comes in the typical tyan box, along with a driver CD, 2 sata cables, a backpanel and a manual with a page saying 'china only'. Great! Also they forget to tell you that the 'iKVM' password for root is 'superuser'.

So far all seems pretty good, be carefull the board turns num lock on at boot, so on laptop keyboards watch out!

My fix isn't brilliant. It requires a mouse (which isn't great) - at least if you want easy navigation) and requires openbox. (you could probably find more lightweight but I have a little working knowledge of it's configuration so it was easier that way)

Basically we start openbox, then autostart xbmc on top with the launcher plugin. I run Arch linux but all of this is very much transferable

Start by install openbox on the system and a browser (I recommend chromium because it has it's own titlebars and it's really fast...) :

pacman -S openbox chromium

wget http://xbmc-launcher.googlecode.com/files/Launcher1.02.zip
cd .xbmc/plugins/programs
unzip unzip Launcher1.02.zip
rm unzip Launcher1.02.zip

Then open ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml
Delete the demo applications block (make sure you get the comment tags) - and then put in something like this.

<applications>
          <application name="xterm">
                <decor>yes</decor>
          </application>
          <application name="xbmc.bin">
                <decor>no</decor>
          </application>
          <application name="chromium">
                <decor>no</decor>
          </application>
</applications>

Notice that xbmc is xbmc.bin. xbmc* will work as well. By default apps will have decor and it's not a problem. just make sure xbmc doesn't otherwise it wont come back to the foreground properly.

To autostart xbmc wipe this file /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart.sh. I'm assuming you wont use openbox for anything else or have multiple users here... It's a HTPC setup here . Replace with this:

#!/bin/bash
(sleep 1 && xbmc) &

We don't want to load anything else than xbmc right??

Now for the last bit, the ~/.xinitrc file :

exec /usr/bin/ck-launch-session openbox-session

If you don't use openbox-session and just openbox the autostart file wont be loaded.

To autologin to openbox I use slim. Look in /etc/slim.conf and add it in /etc/inittab. This is a slightly nicer way than forcing autologin through the inittab.

now symlink all apps you want to autolaunch to somewhere within your home dir. This is because xbmc is silly and doesn't let you go back. So

ln -s /usr/bin/chromium /home/brendan/apps/chromium

Once XBMC has started go to program -> plugins -> launcher and add the applications you want as standalone apps. You can even add them as favorites to make it easier and so you can remove the program menu entry from confluence.

For xterm look at the -geom option to change the size of the terminal. if on a HDTV you may want to make the font bigger too!
To change the size of the windowed mode of XBMC see the tag in .xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml

Part 1 : Build environment
Skip to part2 if you allready have MIC2 or if you have no intention of using fedora
I used Fedora 10, simply because there was a repo for the MIC2 (tool to make images for moblin). For a quick install download a vmware image off thoughtpolice. (the root password is thoughtpolice!).

I'm not sure this is needed but selinux complains during the build and it's notoriously annoying so I disabled it.

system-config-selinux

Add this as moblin_tools.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/:

[MoblinTools]
name=Moblin fc10 tools
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://repo.moblin.org/moblin/tools/fc10/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Now we install mic2. (and all it's dependancies...). Load the squashfs module just to make sure

sudo yum install mic2
sudo modprobe squashfs

Part 2 : making the image!
The Intel/Nokia people very kindly hide away some premade images :

http://repo.meego.com/trunk/repo/ia32/os/image-config/

You can either use their default.ks image or my brendan.ks image with the time and keyboard fixed so that it works in the uk

moblin-image-creator -c brendan.ks -f liveusb

To burn it to a USB stick use:

dd bs=4096 if=moblin-brendan-201002191551.usbimg of=/dev/sdx

You'll find your root user has the following property in the live USB image:

user : root
Password : moblin

Notes :
- I've found my clutter interface usually crashes on the first load. Doing an init 3 and then init 5 in a tty terminal as root usually fixes it.

Bootup is about as fast as Moblin 2.1, syslinux menu has not changed but due to using MIC2 this is not a surprise. Kernel 2.6.33-rc8 is used.

Graphically menus have changed very slightly. It now has a meego graphic as it starts clutter/mutter.

The biggest changes I could spot where Chromium for web browsing and Mozilla nowhere to be found... Thunderbird was being used for email. When halting (which apparently having no icon to do that means it's more user friendly...) it gives you a cute little backdrop of one of those creature like blocks waving at you!

Right now, Meego looks like a clone of Moblin and the only reason for the name change seems to be to appease the Maemo community which still seems to be up in arms about the move to an RPM based distro.

Why BTRFS on the X25-M ?
I decided to write this article because it's very hard to find information about the X25-M or high performance SSDs in general. Under linux, it's nearly impossible. Information on btrfs however is more promising and they even have a nice wiki.

BTRFS is said to have stabilised since the 2.6.32 kernel and has been included since the 2.6.29 kernel. It should not change structure unless a major bug is found is stated on the wiki. You can upgrade to BTRFS from ext4. Therefore if you are more worried about your data than me, then you can use ext4 and when you deem btrfs stable enough upgrade to it.

Some people claim that anything with a journal will damage their SSD. Now this may be true of cheaper SSDs found in netbooks, and basic 2.5" drives sold cheap (you know which ones I mean) that got slower and seemed to stutter after many writes. However the Intel X25-M is said by intel to have a Minimum useful life of 5 years (or 35TB). You can write to it 20GB/day for 5 years! it has a Mean time between failures of 1.2 Million hours. People should probably have been more worried about their normal hard drives to fail than worrying about this SSD.

I'm not saying you should put a swap file on your SSD. Keep that on a normal drive or just don't have one! I like to keep a big swap file to have /tmp as tmpfs. I also keep /var/log on a conventional JFS partition on a rotational drive because it can be nice to be able to mount it under any OS and not just a recent linux kernel.

Performance has been tested on the Intel X25-E SSD under linux by phoronix.com here. However NILFS2 nor BTRFS where present and only default mount options where used. So barrier disabled ext4 was quite good... (disabling barriers on ext is NEVER a good idea). XFS seemed to do quite well but has no SSD mode.

Part 1 - Making your system BTRFS friendly
This will only work on Arch Linux. However have a look here for ubuntu. The rest of the guide should work on any linux distribution however.
install mkinitcpio-btrfs and btfs-progs from the AUR. Remake boot images.
Be carefull to remake the right image. I use kernel26-rc from AUR (2.6.33-rc8 at time of posting). Normal Arch kernel will be kernel26

packer -S mkinitcpio-btrfs btrfs-progs
mkinitcpio -p kernel26-rc

I'm working with a seperate /boot partition. This is probably a better idea until btrfs support gets more common.
Part2 - Moving / and /boot to the new SSD
Format your new drive as you wish. use fdisk -l to see which one is your new drive.
I always use 200MB as /boot and then left the rest for /. You may want to use a seperate /home. I decided leaving the biggest partition would mean less wear as the wear levelling alogrithms would have more room to work. Decide what your opinion is on this

Make the btrfs partition as well as /boot

mkfs.btrfs /dev/sdb2
mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdb1

I will use -o ssd but you can use -o ssd_spread if you are really worried your precious drive will die too soon!

mkdir /mnt/boot
mkdir /mnt/slash
mount -o ssd /dev/sdb2 /mnt/slash
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/boot

Now comes the boring long bit... Then we just create /dev/console and /dev/null
Notice we copy over /boot twice and remove it. it's not like it will take any time to copy a few MBs

find / -xdev | cpio -pm /mnt/slash
rm -rf /mnt/slash/boot
find /boot -xdev | cpio -pm /mnt/boot
mknod /mnt/slash/dev/console c 5 1
mknod /mnt/slash/dev/null c 1 3

Part 3 - Grub
Now we will install grub on the master boot record of the SSD. You don't have to, but otherwise you will be wasting a few precious seconds.
please be carefull. Make sure it's the right drive!!! hd0 should be /dev/sda, hd1 will be /dev/sdb and so on

grub
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd1)

Next edit your /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst file. Make sure that you change your boot options to the new SSD. The great thing about this is that if everything messes up you can just boot straight onto the old drive with the old files!

Part 4 - fstab
Always use UUIDs and not direct names.

blkid /dev/sdb1
blkid /dev/sdb2

then edit /mnt/slash/etc/fstab
and add the two lines for something like this:

# SSD is root and /boot
UUID=c05d5ae2-9eb9-4b6e-9e13-d99ea589933b / btrfs ssd 0 1
UUID=33a46c0e-ad6f-4526-b628-f477aa36e73e /boot ext2 defaults 0 1

The ssd option for / is actually not neccessary. BTRFS is capable of detecting wether or not you have an SSD.

cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/rotational

If this is a 0 then your SSD is correctly detected!

Part 5 - BIOS
Make sure that your sata controller is in AHCI mode. This will probably mean that if you have windows on a sata drive installed as IDE will just not boot anymore. If you don't have this one, the SSD won't have all the advanced commands available. And your SATAII drives won't have NCQ and similar working. No TRIM in IDE mode

Finished, Enjoy the speed!

(For information 9.11 Camelot is revision 26018 - list of tags is here http://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbmc/tags/)
Run only one of the below

svn co http://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk xbmc
svn co -r 26018 http://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk xbmc

Follow the "Preparing the system" (Part 1) section for Boxee on moblin.

install libflac, libsmblient and libtiff

sudo yum install flac flac-devel libsmbclient-devel libtiff-devel

install libfaad and libmpeg2

wget ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/rpmfusion/free/fedora/releases/10/Everything/i386/os/faad2-libs-2.6.1-6.fc10.i386.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/rpmfusion/free/fedora/releases/10/Everything/x86_64/os/faad2-devel-2.6.1-6.fc10.i386.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/rpmfusion/free/fedora/releases/10/Everything/x86_64/os/libmpeg2-0.5.1-3.fc10.i386.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/rpmfusion/free/fedora/releases/10/Everything/x86_64/os/libmpeg2-devel-0.5.1-3.fc10.i386.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh faad2* libmpeg*

For camelot, you will need to apply a patch in order to get past an SSL error. The bug is here http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/8137

wget http://trac.xbmc.org/raw-attachment/ticket/8137/libbdnav-remove-openssl.patch
patch < libbdnav-remove-openssl.patch

choose xbmc/cores/dvdplayer/Codecs/libbdnav/configure.ac

For working VDPAU you will need libvdpau2.0. The easiest way to do that is to install the latest 195 nvidia driver. If you don't have an nvidia card, then just ignore this, you will compile the code with VPDAU disabled.
If you are doing this, I will assume that you have allready followed my guide for the acer revo on moblin.. You will need to recompile Xorg for this to work and change the permissions on the Xorg binary (Parts 3,4 and 6)

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-195.30-pkg1.run

Change the -j argument to number of threads your CPU can execute simulatneously +1. On a revo (Atom N230) that's 3.

mkdir /home/brendan/xbmc_camelot
cd camelot
./bootstrap
./configure --prefix=/home/brendan/xbmc_camelot
make -j3
make install