RPi XBMC

WORK IN PROGRESS, PLEASE AMEND

As I can't find a decent one-page overview of how to get XBMC working on the Raspberry Pi without resorting to downloading a dedicated image, this page should give everyone a hand getting set up (that is, if I am successful...)

The goal is to be able to run XBMC either standalone or under LXDE from the Foundation's Raspbian image.

This guide combines e.g.
 * http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianXBMC
 * http://debian.raspbian.com/qemu/README.txt
 * http://linuxclues.blogspot.com/2007/06/installing-qemu-on-windows-vista.html
 * http://xecdesign.com/qemu-emulating-raspberry-pi-the-easy-way/
 * http://www.raspbmc.com/wiki/technical/building-xbmc/
 * http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO_compile_XBMC_for_Linux_from_source_code
 * http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO_compile_XBMC_for_Linux_on_Debian/Ubuntu

=Ways of installing XBMC= Getting XBMC from the repos (doesn't work in Wheezy) Building XBMC on the raspi (takes a long time) Building XBMC on a Windows machine (Qemu)

So far I haven't got it running...

Building XBMC from source using Qemu
Since it is unbelievably slow to build XBMC on the Raspberry Pi, I used a Windows machine with Qemu to do the build. Ubuntu cross-compile should work to0, but I didn't try it yet...

Preparation

 * Get 'Putty' (Windows Installer) from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
 * Get latest 'Qemu-1.2.0-rc0-windows.zip' from http://lassauge.free.fr/qemu/
 * Get 'kernel-qemu' from http://xecdesign.com/downloads/linux-qemu/kernel-qemu (Interesting read: http://xecdesign.com/qemu-emulating-raspberry-pi-the-easy-way/)
 * Get most recent Raspbian image ('2012-09-18 Wheezy' at time of writing) from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads (The Foundation's version of Raspbian)
 * Install OpenVPN to get a working Network TAP driver from http://openvpn.net/index.php/download/community-downloads.html (get the Windows installer)

After installing OpenVPN follow this guide to create (remember it's name and make sure there's no spaces in it) a network TAP interface http://linuxclues.blogspot.com/2007/06/installing-qemu-on-windows-vista.html

On Windows, create folder structure like so: D:\Qemu (holding the Qemu-1.2.0-rc0-windows.zip contents) D:\Qemu\Raspbian (holding the 'kernel-qemu' file and the Raspbian image)

First you need to use qemu-img to resize the img file:

Usage is: qemu-img resize filename size

It helps to temporarily move the wheezy image into D:\Qemu

3.7G seems to be the max you can resize to.

Open comandline and navigate to D:\Qemu

Example: qemu-img resize 2012-09-18-wheezy-raspbian.img 3.7G

Then create a .bat file under D:\Qemu, containing the following launch string: qemu-system-armw.exe -M versatilepb -cpu arm1136 -m 1024 -kernel raspbian\kernel-qemu -hda raspbian\2012-09-18-wheezy-raspbian.img -net nic -net tap,ifname=TAP0 -append "root=/dev/sda2 panic=1" -serial stdio

Note: Replace TAP0 with whatever your Tap interface is named. I would suggest renaming it to something without spaces. ie. Tap0

Resize the Raspbian rootfs:

Fix raspi-config resize issue with Qemu:

cp /usr/bin/raspi-config ~ sed -i 's/mmcblk0p2/sda2/' ~/raspi-config sed -i 's/mmcblk0/sda/' ~/raspi-config sudo ~/raspi-config

http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianXBMC

=References=