Linux Trying to get a Linux XBMC good with a Dell Latitude D600
#1
So, I've been using quite an old laptop running XP to be my mediaserver which was connected to a TV. I got introduced to XBMC about a month or two ago and since then, my plan is getting one or two tiny PCs which have the whole house wired up, but I wanted to try get that sorted initially with the least amount of investment (ie. get it set up and working perfectly with this laptop, then when I've got proper plans in place, but a few more necessary ingredients Smile ).

I installed Ubuntu 11.10 (just because that's what I've always dipped my toe in) on the machine and while pretty much everything is working correctly (even the s-video out!), the playback performance is really poor, I've thrown varying quality levels of videos (mostly XVid avis) at mplayer, VLC, Banshee and XBMC and not once can I say the playback has been anywhere near smooth and mostly has been crazy choppy and seems to be less than 10fps.

There are a few other posts here,
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=49844
and on Ubuntu's own forum,
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1095102
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1381370

About this laptop, or the graphics card in this laptop (ATI Radeon RV250 "Mobility FireGL 9000"), but they're all quite dated, most recent is from Feb 2010, so I don't know how much of what's said in them is totally relevant (for instance a lot of the Ubuntu stuff is about using outdated xorg.conf configurations that aren't used in recent Ubuntu versions, or the proprietary driver that's not compatible with recent Ubuntu versions {8.04 being the latest version you could use that driver}).

Basically, I think the latest Ubuntu was maybe a bad choice, but I don't know. What my goal is, is to get a stable version of Linux working, with a perfect-as-possible version of XBMC, but I've no idea what's the best path to get there. The laptop performed very well and was able to handle near everything that was thrown at it when running XP and XBMC, so I didn't think this was going to be a huge issue.

I'm decent enough with Linux and have no problem hitting a big old reset button and starting again, with a new operating system and the like. Just wouldn't mind a few pointers before going that route first Smile
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Trying to get a Linux XBMC good with a Dell Latitude D6000