XBMC, Xbox Media Center

Is simply the best mediaplayer that has ever existed period. It is fast, easy to use and features several interesting features such as the ability to play .rar files containg .iso files or other kinds of media.

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

SBackup doesn’t do it.

I got around to trying SBackup (again!) with hopes of finally solving that backup issue that has be botherning me for a while now. I decided to stick a usb-drive in the dock at work and then try to have the backups directed there.

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.

Getting rid of PulseAudio

Found an excellent guide (in Swedish) to remove PulseAudio. Basically do this:

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.

XBMC yes, as long as you get rid of PulseAudio

As I wrote in my earlier post about PulseAudio it doesn’t work to well with XBMC Media Center.

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…

XBMC and Pulseaudio

Xbox Media Center seems to have a share of problems on my system. The most recent events has been that the audio seems to crash, either going silent or getting stuck in a endless loop that’s quite annoying. This seems to happen quite often if I jump in movies.

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.

Network Manager only allows one vpn connection

Darn, today I got around to installning my second vpn which gave me more trouble than I asked for. I have been running my primary connection to my office for a while and it has been working flawlessly, it’s really, really nice to be able to manage stuff like this in the network manager.

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.

Taming the Intrepid Ibex with Ubuntu-tweak

Downloaded Ubuntu-tweak to give it a try, and found some interesting settings. The only thing used for now is:

“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)

Ubuntu_restriced_extras.

Is probably one of the easiest fixes to get Ubuntu a lot more useful in one single step. It adds MS Fonts, Flash-plugin, Java RE, DVD Playback and MP3 support. Just get it.

Dropbox tinyurls trick

Just stumbled across this post on ubuntu-tutorials.com which has a rather nice tip for those using public links in dropbox which I wrote about eariler

Lovely network manager

Last week I was working at a clients site and had to configure my computer to use a static IP, netmask, gateway and special DNS-servers. The client has a very closed network and no DHCP what so ever, so apart from using a static ip-address I could only use their DNS-servers.

I just love the network-manager. Dunno if this is new functionality or if it has been there all the time but it isn’t harder than to right-click on the network manager and add another network. I always use the “Auto eth0” connection, since it works at my office and at home. I was wondering for a while how this setting could conflict with my office settings.

No worries, when I got back to the office, and when I got home, it automagically used the “Auto eth0” again. But more interesting was that when I got back a couple of days later it found the tailored connection again. I’m not sure how this was done, did network manager try it since it couldn’t get and DHCP or did it recognize the network in some other way? Works flawlessly for me anyway.

The network manager is my friend keeping track of my 5 regular wirless connections, my mobile broadband, my office vpn and also my wired connections in one place – it feels so good compared to what I was used to (which involved some rather ugly shell-scripts written by myself).