Sunday 23 June 2013

Get an up to date version of XBMC on your debian rig

I am a big fan of the latest version of XBMC : frodo (version 12).

If you are using an Ubuntu based distro then you can get hold of this latest version with no problems.

If,  however,  you are using a Debian based distro,  such as the excellent SolydXK or the also excellent Crunchbang then you are stuck at version 11.  Apparently debian did not like some of the non FOSS eliments used in the newer version so its not in their repos.  I make no critisism of Debian for that,  that is their philosophy and they are entitled to it.

If,  you are still after version 12 on a Debian distro: what to do:

Well....head over here

Quite a bit of that page is in German,  but fear not,  the important bits are in English as well.

I tried to set this up under Crunchbang a little while ago and had no success,  but yesterday I tried again with SolydXK and it seemed to work just fine.

This is what I did.....

wget http://debian.oppserver.net/gpg-debian.oppserver.net-signing-pubkey.asc -O - | sudo apt-key add -
sudo su -c 'echo "deb http://debian.oppserver.net/xbmc/ wheezy main non-free contrib" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/oppxbmc.sources.list'
sudo su -c 'echo "deb-src http://debian.oppserver.net/xbmc/ wheezy main non-free contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/oppxbmc.sources.list'
sudo aptitude update 
 

Update: May 2016

These days life is a little easier for those who wish to mix a bit of debian with XBMC (nowadays Kodi).

When I build machines for those very new to linux who need reliability above all I now use MX-15.  It uses the stable debian repos by default and yet it has the latest version of XFCE (4.12 at time of writing) powering things.

I recently had a brief forum exchange on using Kodi in MX-15.  It turns out if you want to do this: don't enable the debian multimedia repos as they carry an old version of Kodi.  I had done this and also given the debian multimedia repos a higher priority: so when I searched in Synaptic for Kodi all it found was the old version.

MX-15 now carries version 16.0 of Kodi in its stable repos,  and 16.1 in its testing repos: so you can have the best of both worlds.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just for your info I installed xbmc 13 (Gotham) today from the Solydx repos but it doesn't work. You can open the program but as soon as you scroll across and click in anything - eg Program/Settings xbmc closes and throws me back to the desktop. Happens every time i try to do anything, like install an addon. I uninstalled (purged) and tried the CLIs you posted above. Same thing happens because the links all point to Gotham now.

Going to try and find a way to install Frodo from another source and see if that is any better

Phil Mulley said...

Looks like there are some issues with XBMC at present. I have done some googling around and it seems as is there is an issue betweeb XBMC and the github. There is a temporary fix: see http://www.xbmchub.com/forums/threads/20725-XBMC-suddenly-started-crashing but this involves temporarily disabling some repositories that are not playing nicely with Git.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info.I had a look at the post but mine is a different issue I think. I installed xmbc in Solydx as I said, but have never been able to add any repos or addons, so removing them to a different folder is not an option! As soon as I click on any menu item - e.g. to install an addon, xmbc closes and I am back at the Solydx desktop.

Also JFYI , when I log into your blog in both Chrome and Firefox, I see the words "2 comments" but the actual comments are not there?

Anonymous said...

got yet another advice today that there was a new comment but don't see anything new?

Phil Mulley said...

Comments do seem to be working again (after fiddling around with some G+ settings)

Post a Comment