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How To Build A Slackware Mediacenter (HTPC) With XBMC

My Situation

I wanted a stand alone media center and everything pointed to XBMC. I tried the various LiveCD versions of XBMC but each had problems that either prevented the system from working or were too annoying. The solution turned out to be a Slackware 14 box that boots right into XBMC.

Here's What I Did

  1. Install Slackware on an old PC.
    1. Set the default windows manager to TWM.
  2. Create user xbmc and login as user xbmc.
  3. Copy /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.twm to ~/.xinitrc
  4. Edit ~/.xinitrc and at the bottom, change:
    /usr/bin/twm &
    /usr/bin/xclock -geometry 50x50-1+1 &
    /usr/bin/xterm -geometry 80x50+494+51 &
    /usr/bin/xterm -geometry 80x20+494-0 &
    exec /usr/bin/xterm -geometry 80x66+0+0 -name login

    to:

    /usr/bin/twm &
    #/usr/bin/xclock -geometry 50x50-1+1 &
    #/usr/bin/xterm -geometry 80x50+494+51 &
    #/usr/bin/xterm -geometry 80x20+494-0 &
    #exec /usr/bin/xterm -geometry 80x66+0+0 -name login
    exec /usr/bin/xbmc -geometry +0+0
  5. “su” to root
  6. Install FFMPEG, XBMC and their dependencies via sbopkg.
  7. Edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local and add:
    sudo -u xbmc startx

After you reboot the machine, it should boot right into XBMC and you should have a working media center/HTPC.

Some Other Things to Configure

If you keep your media files on other machines and they are accessible via Samba or NFS, make sure you enable file sharing:

  • To enable Samba file sharing:
    chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.samba;/etc/rc.d/rc.samba start
  • To enable NFS file sharing:
    chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd;/etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd start

For NFS, you'll have to do some other configuration but all that is explained in the NFS wiki pages.

Sources

* Originally written by arfon

 howtos:multimedia:htpc ()