Instructions for building XBMC for Raspbian

[ejsolutions]

Hi ejsolutions,

It might be worth speaking to Mike, perhaps he will be able to host the image for you on the Raspbian repository? I am not entirely sure if there is a user contributed section yet but I know it was in the plans. It is very useful to have a pre configured image available.

Regards,

John

Hosting isn't the issue - I run various Cloud VPSes, though github etc. are a better option.

[Lirex]

I was able to compile without problems on XMBC rpi_pisces_r3.zip.
How can I let the PI automatically start XBMC mode?

[silas]

As there wasn't one single image available (I hate split zip's ), I decided to create one.

It's a 4GB sd-card image, packaged into an 784MB 7zip.

It's based on Pisces Image, and updated via apt-get yesterday. The rest is 99% clean pisces+xbmc

Instructions:
Write it to your sdcard ( http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup ), and if your sdcard is bigger then 4GB, you might want to resize it ( http://elinux.org/RPi_Resize_Flash_Partitions )

Login: raspbian
Password: raspbian

To start XBMC:
Option 1:
Go into lxde (type "startx") and use the shortcut on the desktop.
Everything works fine here, even video. To get back to the console, first exit xbmc, and then press CRTL+ALT+Backspace.

Option2:
Launch it directly from the console by typing

Code: Select all

clear ; sudo /usr/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin

Download:
http://silenz.se/download/raspberian-xbmc.img.7z
Im hosting it on my own server, which at least should have better speed as the filesharing sites, but it might get slow if there are many downloads at the time...

PS: I might create an image that autoboots into xbmc later.

[Poincare]

just started building now. Thanks to all for the great work! Hope I can contribute in some way to the projects....

[john.mills]

Hello Silas,

Thanks for the work you have put in with this image, I would agree with your suggestion to create an additional image that auto logs in to XBMC.

Reason being that if the Raspberry Pi is to be used exclusively as a media player (a single use case, rather than multi-purpose computing device) with a TV then you don't want to go to the hassle of connecting a keyboard every time you want to watch a movie. I believe a good many people were looking to purchase a Raspberry Pi for this reason.

Ideally you would want the device to boot up to XBMC and have support for your remote control and networking be in place right away.

Thanks and best regards,

John

[masterluke]

Anyone else getting tormented by a flashing cursor at the top left of the screen? Sometimes there when watching video and sometimes not. No crashes yet.

You could try a
tput civis
before launching XBMC
and
tput cnorm
To restore the cursor after XBMC exits

In case anyone else has this, the solution above works fine. I created a script XBMC.sh with the following in which works ok..

tput civis
clear
sudo /usr/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin
tput cnorm

[masterluke]

I was also getting the same EGL error. I fixed it by doing what mpthompson said and recreating the symbolic links. I'm a total linux newb and unsure if I did this right but I added the following code to /etc/rc.local

Code: Select all

sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libEGL.so /usr/lib/libEGL.so
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libEGL.so /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libEGL.so
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libEGL.so /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libEGL.so.1
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libEGL_static.a /usr/lib/libEGL_static.a
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libEGL_static.a /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libEGL_static.a
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libGLESv2.so /usr/lib/libGLESv2.so
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libGLESv2.so /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libGLESv2.so
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libGLESv2.so /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libGLESv2.so.2
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libGLESv2_static.a /usr/lib/libGLESv2_static.a
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libGLESv2_static.a /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libGLESv2_static.a
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libbcm_host.so /usr/lib/libbcm_host.so
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libbcm_host.so /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libbcm_host.so
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libvchiq_arm.a /usr/lib/libvchiq_arm.a
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libvchiq_arm.a /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libvchiq_arm.a
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libvchiq_arm.so /usr/lib/libvchiq_arm.so
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libvchiq_arm.so /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libvchiq_arm.so
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libvcos.a /usr/lib/libvcos.a
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libvcos.a /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libvcos.a
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libvcos.so /usr/lib/libvcos.so
sudo ln -fs /opt/vc/lib/libvcos.so /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libvcos.so

I've done 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and 'rpi-update' as well as install lirc. All of which would break my install before this fix but now, after adding the above, XBMC loads like it should.

Thanks, worked for me with the same error (not sure why it didn't work before)

[TarjeiB]

Great job on the wiki, compiling now and looking good so far.

One thing - how about adding ALSA support? I also compiled squeezeslave on my RPi and it's using ALSA. If both did it'd be alot cleaner (no sound device busy etc.).

[Beini]

Here's the source files for building a debian package out of this. Just some hacks to the upstream packaging files. Hopefully, someone will pick these up, as I have no intention to maintain these. (I find debian packaging to be PITA, PKGBUILDs for the win ). Build time was few hours with distcc compiler on my i3 laptop.

-Add /opt/vc/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH to run it. I myself have a file 0_broadcom.conf in /etc/ld.so.conf.d.
-The warnings about deprecated swp{b} during compile were gone after uprading to boost 1.50. Did not make this dependency as I also could have been missing some boost packages.
-See here how the upstream does the packaging: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc-packaging

http://ompldr.org/vZXF5Nw/xbmc-rbp_11.0 ... ian.tar.gz
http://ompldr.org/vZXF5OA/xbmc-rbp_11.0 ... e56f42.dsc
http://ompldr.org/vZXF6Mw/xbmc-rbp_11.0 ... rig.tar.gz

[abishur]

Interesting issue I'm having. First I couldn't build it following the instructions using the Pieces RC3 image. It would fail on the make, just something to note. My pi did freeze up in the middle of downloading all those packages, it claimed to finish after I rebooted and re initiated but maybe it messed something up.

Regardless, I used one of the precompiled images (the one iggy was kind enough to put up) and I'm noticing something odd. I have hdmi_mode=16 set in my config.txt and when I try to change my resolution to 1920x1080 @ 60Hz it changes, but I get a screen full of green pixels around every shape. Any idea why this might be happening? I have overscan disabled on my TV and config.txt, hdmi_mode=16 should set the resolution of the console to 1920x1080, I'm running xbmc from console. I do notice that everything looks fine at boot, but then when it clears the screen and goes to the login prompt some of the screen is being cut off. Is there something changing the screen resolution at that point?

[herrb]

Looking at the outlandish build times in the order of days -- -- has anyone tried a build with a hard disk instead of a card-only file system setup? Might give that a shot and report back...

[Tavalin]

Hopefully a quick question...

I built XBMC on my Raspbian image last week. It seemed to be working fine and everything was dandy. Since then I've done an rpi-update and new firmware/libraries have been installed. This seems to have broken XBMC, it errors when I try and run it. I'm guessing something to do with updated libraries.

Does this mean I'll have to rebuild it? If yes, is there a quicker way to rebuild than the first time? Also if yes, would it be recommended to move to something like OpenELEC/Raspbmc if changing libraries is likely to break it fairly often?

Cheers

[pholy]

Did you do (as root) ldconfig to rebuild the library cache files? I am not (yet) using xbmc, but tvservice (for example) would not work until I rebuilt the loader's library cache.

It will be a lot quicker than a rebuild, if it works.

[MoonTEC]

Looking at the outlandish build times in the order of days -- -- has anyone tried a build with a hard disk instead of a card-only file system setup? Might give that a shot and report back...

With hard disk root partition, starting from rpi-update to launching xbmc took 9hrs. Just now noticed arm_freq=600, because earlier was playing with data mining and for headless rpi runing scripts with wget and awk its more than enough.
Tested on Hexxeh image, additionally installed automake, libtool, autopoint and libboost1.50-dev instead off libboost1.49-dev.

[Tavalin]

Did you do (as root) ldconfig to rebuild the library cache files? I am not (yet) using xbmc, but tvservice (for example) would not work until I rebuilt the loader's library cache.

It will be a lot quicker than a rebuild, if it works.

I'll give this a go later when I get home and report back. Thanks.

[masterluke]

Hopefully a quick question...

I built XBMC on my Raspbian image last week. It seemed to be working fine and everything was dandy. Since then I've done an rpi-update and new firmware/libraries have been installed. This seems to have broken XBMC, it errors when I try and run it. I'm guessing something to do with updated libraries.

Does this mean I'll have to rebuild it? If yes, is there a quicker way to rebuild than the first time? Also if yes, would it be recommended to move to something like OpenELEC/Raspbmc if changing libraries is likely to break it fairly often?

Cheers

See this post to fix XBMC - no need to rebuild..

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 34#p122534

.. stumped me for a bit too but this process works.

[mcscruff]

As there wasn't one single image available (I hate split zip's ), I decided to create one.

It's a 4GB sd-card image, packaged into an 784MB 7zip.

It's based on Pisces Image, and updated via apt-get yesterday. The rest is 99% clean pisces+xbmc

Instructions:
Write it to your sdcard ( http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup ), and if your sdcard is bigger then 4GB, you might want to resize it ( http://elinux.org/RPi_Resize_Flash_Partitions )

Login: raspbian
Password: raspbian

To start XBMC:
Option 1:
Go into lxde (type "startx") and use the shortcut on the desktop.
Everything works fine here, even video. To get back to the console, first exit xbmc, and then press CRTL+ALT+Backspace.

Option2:
Launch it directly from the console by typing

Code: Select all

clear ; sudo /usr/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin

Download:
http://silenz.se/download/raspberian-xbmc.img.7z
Im hosting it on my own server, which at least should have better speed as the filesharing sites, but it might get slow if there are many downloads at the time...

PS: I might create an image that autoboots into xbmc later.

Thanks Mate, just tested this and its good . Just need to change the keyboard layout (for anyone looking for / its shift + 7

[silas]

Thanks Mate, just tested this and its good . Just need to change the keyboard layout (for anyone looking for / its shift + 7

Thanks!

To change the keyboard layout, run:

Code: Select all

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

It's the Swedish keyboard layout by default, so don't think you have zombies in your raspberry if åäö start to appear

I will build an image with the official raspbian image tomorrow, and then a autobooting version will also be available. (I had it working fine, but messed something up in the last minute )

[john.mills]

That sounds great Silas,

I would consider having the all wifi drivers there by default along with any remote control handsets that you can find drivers for if it is not too much work. Doing this you will be targeting the 'plugin and forget it' crowd. Oh and SAMBA support if not implemented would be nice. Sorry if this there already, but I haven't had a chance to test your image yet.

Best regards,

John

[silas]

That sounds great Silas,

I would consider having the all wifi drivers there by default along with any remote control handsets that you can find drivers for if it is not too much work. Doing this you will be targeting the 'plugin and forget it' crowd. Oh and SAMBA support if not implemented would be nice. Sorry if this there already, but I haven't had a chance to test your image yet.

Best regards,

John

While I'm not sure every remote will work, but at least my Fujitsu-Siemens USB/IR remote works out of the box. I think XBMC includes samba support. If not i will absolutely fix that, because samba is nice
I don't have any wifi usb sticks, so i can't try that. But it would be fantastic if everyone that tries this out tells me if i need to add drivers for it to work out of the box, both for remotes and wifi.

On a unrelated note, this is how much my traffic has gone up the last days:

The red one is outgoing, and that means i have uploaded about 43GB, thats 45 downloads. Nice

[chochis]

Worked like a champ!
Thanks!

[john.mills]

@Silas: That's great work, I'm sure the ISP / hosting company will be happy with you come the end of the month

A great out of the box experience will be a big deal for a lot of people. I do have one other suggestion, it might be worth looking at the output resolution you display at. I guess that most people will be outputting on a HDTV. I would consider a slight overscan of the image so you don't see a black border on the TV, if you have done this already then apologies. It is only a small point but I do find it a little anoying to have the black bars on the TV in the living room. I'll grab your image tomorrow and give it a try.... I'll add some more red to that list! Seriously, good work Silas!

John

[DGreenMan]

Hi Silas

Can you include a wifi driver for wifi dongle RTL8188CU

This a widely available wifi ranging from £1.50 -£5 depending on how long willing to wait for delivery

It's had reports of working on debian raspbmc etc but I don't like them find them laggy to much compared to openelec but openelec does not have this driver installed

Hope to hear back from you soon

[grahamaikman]

can someone help me get xbmc running on my rpi, i've got debian on it just now, and its running on my wifi, i'm sharing files from my windows machine to the rpi, i was wanting to watch them, and figured i might be able to use the xbmc interface to do it

[silas]

Hi Silas

Can you include a wifi driver for wifi dongle RTL8188CU

This a widely available wifi ranging from £1.50 -£5 depending on how long willing to wait for delivery

It's had reports of working on debian raspbmc etc but I don't like them find them laggy to much compared to openelec but openelec does not have this driver installed

Hope to hear back from you soon

Hi, green little man

I would be happy to include that. But the only thing i found was this script: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=6256
I can (and will) include that script (or a script to download and run this script, that would make it possible to always get the latest version ), but the user will need to run the script manually.

My solution would be to include it in the instructions. That isn't a "plug and play" solution, but hey, you shouldn't buy an raspberry pi if you can't even type one command

I would be interested in one of those 1.50 devices, especially those that can run without powered usb hub, (china shipping is fine), can you point me to one?
The cheapest one i could find was for about 5USD with shipping.

@john.mills about overscan
I have it set do disable_overscan as that is what makes it fit my screen without any additional settings. If you see black borders please report and well try to find a fix that works for everyone out of the box (if thats possible)

can someone help me get xbmc running on my rpi, i've got debian on it just now, and its running on my wifi, i'm sharing files from my windows machine to the rpi, i was wanting to watch them, and figured i might be able to use the xbmc interface to do it

Im pretty sure the instructions to build xbmc work on debian too.
If you don't want to compile yourself, you should eather get openelec, or raspbian with my precompiled xbmc.


To finish this post, I just wanted to say that xbmc is currently buildning on the new official image ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 66&t=11365 ).

Im also looking into the possibility to make a menu to choose between console and xbmc at boot. If it has remote control support, that would be a perfect solution