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 made to system just not work or were too annoying. The solution turned out to be a Slackware 14 box that boots right into XBMC.

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” back 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.

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

• 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.

* Originally written by arfon