[nickr]

cd is change directory.

Extract to your home directory'

[patseguin]

Ok I got it to work and it created the USB stick. However, when booting from it instead of it running live it just gives me options to install

[nickr]

You have made the install medium which is the first step. You now need to install to a different device, which may also be a USB device. This is all explained in the wiki.

[patseguin]

Ah I thought it was making a live USB. So if I put in another USB stick I should be able to install to that?

[patseguin]

Got it installed and working on another USB drive. Only problem is my sources I add don't get scraped and I can't install any addons. I rebooted and all my settings were reset. I guess this is because it's running off a USB stick.

[nickr]

There should be a writable partition on the USB stick where settings are saved.

Activate SSH in openelec settings, SSH in and tell us the output of the mount command. User is root, password openelec.

[patseguin]

I will when I do my main htpc today. Thanks so much for turning me on to this. My ION box is now like a XBMC appliance. I plan on testing it on my main htpc to make sure that 3d, HD audio, and everything works fine.

This OpenElec is great because you just have an XBMC box and no worries about Windows, extra drivers, etc.

I managed to copy over my userdata file just by merely dragging the files to the directory in the openelec device that showed up under network on my PC just like my NAS and other pc's do. Problems arose when I wanted to copy my addons folder so I could have skins not in the repo. In windows SMB, it doesn't show where addons are I.e. /storage/.xbmc/addons. I Googled it and found some instructions to make a config file to make that folder accessible through SMB. It didn't work. In fact, after that when I tried to access the openelec device I got prompted for a username and password. root and openelec didn't work. I deleted that config file and accessing the device still prompted for a user and password and root and openelec didn't work. I ultimately downloaded the skins I wanted and saved the zip's to my NAS and installed them from XBMC via SMB. I'm only afraid that if I make my mason box an openelec device, it might be inaccessible like that and I won't be able to get my userdata folder over (mainly advancedsettings for SQL and my sources to avoid re scraping).

EDIT: Also, what happens with new releases like beta 2 and eventually release? Do I have to make a new stick and do the whole thing again? It would be nice if XBMC could update without having to reinstall the full OpenElec system.

EDIT 2, I searched and see that OpenElec auto updates. It just gets better and better. I'm not sure why not everyone uses it. No background weight of Windows, it just boots quickly right into XBMC. You were right man. I'm marking the post as solved but hope we can continue a little discussion on my worries about accessibility on my 2nd machine.

[Prof Yaffle]

There are ways and means to permanently mount your NAS to your OpenElec systems. That would give you a directory path from your home directory, and that would allow you to simply navigate to your NAS and any files you'd saved on it. That would allow you to download and save zips of new skins, and then install them directly instead of copying them anywhere.

I don't move that much back and forth, so I find ftp and a quick bit of command-line mv-ing works for me. The whole point is that, as an appliance, you don't need to be tinkering all the time: you just switch it on and use it. If you're prepared for a little manual work, you can do similar with directories and anything else: copy them to somewhere on the OE box, ssh in, stop XBMC as I said in my previous post, mv the directory to where it should be, and restart XBMC again. It's genuinely really easy, it's a handful of commands to learn.

Re: updating... yes, OE will auto-update between release versions. If you need to update it manually, it's simply a case of downloading the new version and copy a couple of files over to the system through Windows Explorer. Reboot the HTPC and you're done.

[patseguin]

Ok but there's no command line in OpenElec right? Basically XBMC is the only thing running right? I'm not sure what you mean by navigating to my NAS and any files on it. Are you saying this is done on the openelec system somehow? For instance if I needed to copy an advancedsettings.xml to the userdata folder. I don't think XBMC allows that kind of file management. I'm assuming you mean I have to ssh in to copy files over. For skins, I just put the zips on my NAS and from XBMC I selected install from zip and navigated to the file via SMB to install the skin. My main concern is the ability to get non-addons onto it like xml files and such. I was able to last night until the system magically required a password and nothing worked. Luckily I had already copied over my userdata so I had access to mySQL database. For the skins, installing from zip was fine luckily. The box remains password protected when trying to access from Windows.

[Prof Yaffle]

The command line is what you see when you ssh in from another system. Once you're there, you've got a full Linux system to play with, albeit one that's highly tuned to running XBMC as an appliance.

By navigating to your NAS, I mean something like mounting your NAS (say, //192.168.2.1/shares/folder) onto the OpenElec directory tree (say, /home/user) so you can't tell the different (so you get /home/user/shares/folder). That's really what NFS does.

So, if you did this, you could copy skip zips into "folder" on your NAS, and then go into Addons -> Add from ZIP in XBMC on the OE box as you would normally do. It will open up a directory listing, your home folder is one, and you then just go from there to shares/folder and there's your ZIP - still on your NAS, but appearing as a local file.

There is also a file manager in XBMC, although I've never used it - but that should allow you to copy things around with abandon. Again, if you had your NAS mounted onto the OE filesystem, you're just copying files locally as far as anything is concerned. If not, copy them through Windows Explorer to wherever you can and then use the XBMC file manager or the ssh command line to rename them or move them to where they should be.

I can't explain that password issue, I must say... it's probably related to that conf file (can you post a copy of it?).

[patseguin]

That makes sense. I was already able to install addons from zips by selecting SMB and navigating to my NAS and the folder that had the zip's. I didn't have to mount anything. As for copying files, I'll rely on Windows on my computer to drag them over. Here are the instructions I found that might have borked my sama access to the system. I since deleted the config file but it didn't change anything.

[XBMC]
path = /storage/.xbmc
available = yes
browsable = yes
public = yes
writable = yes
root preexec = mkdir -p /storage/.xbmc

[Prof Yaffle]

You've added that to samba.conf, yes? That shouldn't bork anything... let me look later at what my OE systems have, it may just be that you've done something to the file that you haven't undone and you've lost some kind of default "don't hassle me for a password" option.

[patseguin]

Ok.min the meantime, I made a USB stick for my main htpc and everything works as it should. HD audio, 3D, everything. Looks like I'll install it. Don't need Windows!

[patseguin]

Well I've had quite a saga and learned a lot. OpenElec is the way to go if your HTPC is only there to run XBMC and it does a great job.

I found out I meant to copy my userdata file to my NAS last night from my main htpc but all I did was copy it to the bedroom HTPC. I installed OpenElec on my main htpc only to find out that I hadn't backed up my userdata onto my NAS. No problem except my bedroom htpc can no longer be accessed by windows explorer for some unknow reason. I might even re-install it to fix it, the install is so easy. Anyways, with a lot of research, I managed to mount a USB stick and copy my user data to it and copied it to my NAS. I then copied it to my living room htpc. This is only really an issue for those that use advancedsettings.xml and SQL. Otherwise, installing OpenElec is easy and adding sources is easy just like in any XBMC version.

I'm copying my userdata to my living room openelec pc and will reboot and expect to see all my sources with full SQL integration. I'll update the post with my results.

As a caveat, the addons folder is not viewable in explorer so you can't copy files to it. You just have to download the zip files to a NAS or whatever and navigate to that when installing from zip.

[Prof Yaffle]

Okay, inconclusive... I *suspect* that you've over-written the system /etc/samba/smb.conf with just this - maybe by creating ~/.configfiles/samba.conf - and that in turn has knocked out everything else. You'd need to look. A re-install would certainly fix this, though.

The perhaps-good-news is that you don't necessarily need to share the ~/.xbmc folder - ~/.xbmc/userdata is shared automatically through Samba, so you can copy things there through Explorer (or Nautilis, or any SMB-aware file manager) or directly-edit advancedsettings.xml and similar.

If you can't get ~/,xbmc/addons to share and really feel the need to copy stuff to it instead of re-installing an addon on the new system, you can always drag them to ~/.xbmc/userdata and then ssh in, then it's simply a case of:

# cd .xbmc/userdata
# mv <thethingthatIjustcopied> ../addons

For any of this, I'd again stress closing XBMC from the command prompt first, though, as changes could easily be over-written otherwise.

# touch /var/lock/xbmc.disabled <== while this file exists, XBMC won't start or restart
# killall xbmc.bin <== this will kill XBMC to stop it from writing to any config files
<do some file firkling>
# rm /var/lock/xbmc.disabled <== removing this file means OpenElec will now restart XBMC again, and it will use any new userdata files (&c) that you've tweaked