Originally developed for the Xbox it has now been moved to Linux, Windows, Apple-TV and (most interesting) Live-CD / USB-stick which should open the opportunity for hardware manufacturers to start building cool media-center-machines.

There is no repository available (yet) for Intrepid, but in the forums someone claimed that the hardy repositories works fine. So go to:
System / Administration / Software sources and hit the “Third-party software” tab. Add these two, one-by-one:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main
Close and reload and goto Add/Remove applications where

Didn’t work.

What did work was the first few rounds of backups. It ran at the designated tiime and it placed tha backups in the right spot (which was /media/disk-1). The problem was that when I was out of the office the backup still ran, quietly. Still backing up to /media/disk-1 which in those cases didn’t have anything mounted. Disk became full, and I had loads of problems with it, so I disabled it again. When I have time I will try to find a solution to this, but even if there is one, this feels like something that isn’t easy enough for the average Joe and such an important function should be.

alsamixer
Check that your system uses Pulseaudio (it says clearly by Card and Chip) in the top left corner.

sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio
killall pulseaudio
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound

Then run:
alsamixer
And check that it is not using PulseAudio any longer.

I will report after thorough testing if it works fine.

I have now been using XBMC quite a lot for a full week and have no problems what so ever, as long as PulseAudio is closed first.

sudo killall pulseaudio

As soon as I have a little more time I will investigate how a uninstall of PulseAudio could affect the system…

The first solution, rebooting the system, wasn’t exactly neat. The second is sort-of work-in-progress. But it seems to work which is nice:

In System – Preferences – Sound I’ve changed all settings to use ALSA

Then either before I start XBMC or when the problem occurs I run:

sudo killall pulseaudio
ps aux | grep pulse

If there still is pulseaudio processes left I kill them with

sudo kill -9 whateverprocess

I think this happens mostly when I has been running XBMC and the audio is hung. Of course the ideal thing here would be to disable pulseaudio completely, or to pray for team-xbmc to fix this. I have not decided what to do yet, I have to do some reading on this PulseAudio, it might be there for some other reason than to break XBMC.

The second vpn connection, to a datacenter at work is not working as well though. First I have some kind of routing problem – when this is connected I can’t access anything outside of the vpn-route

The explanation is in routing. But I didn’t succeed in fixing it in the network manager settings. Will try again when I have more time.

default * 0.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 tap0

The other thing that has pussled me is that I cannot activate both my vpn’s at the same time. First I thought it was a configuration misstake (since I have been using these two OpenVPN connections simultaneously on 8.04) but the I found this on Ubuntu Brainstorm. It seems to be a limit set in Network Manager. Bummer.

Should be easy to fix though, since it was working outside NM, hopefully someone with skillz will do that.

“Startup” – “Autostart”
Disabled Bluetooth Manager and Visual Assistance since I don’t used them

“Applications” – “Third Party Sources” -
Added the Google Linux repository

“Applications” – “Add/Remove”
Added VLC Media Player (which I have been missing). Noticed that “Ubuntu Restricted Extras” (which I wrote about here was easily availble from here, same thing with XBMC)