[kameleon25]

Hello all,

I have a HTPC I have built a few years ago (although it has seen a few upgrades here and there). Originally it was a Mythbuntu box as I used it to record tv. That went away when I wanted to watch 1080p HD movies and I went with MediaPortal on Vista. Now I am tired of the disk noise and constant windows related popups that take over the screen. I stumbled upon xbmc and like what I see. I downloaded the live cd and ran it. I must say I am amazed that it worked out of the box with my remote (windows media center style but replaced the remote with a logitech harmony 880), and my IGP which is a nVidia 9400 chip. I have yet to have gotten to the point of playing an HD movie on it, but that should be easy.

What I want to happen is this: Run XBMC off my 4GB usb thumb drive and not lose my settings when I reboot or power down. I have found instructions on how to use unetbootin and making a permanent storage file, however there are a few issues.

1. The boot never gets past the GRUB prompt
2. When I try to make the live-rw.img file using toporesize it errors out with some error about "cannot write 8 bits at end....." This is probably easy to fix once I can boot the drive and use actual linux tools to do it as I am in windows trying to do this.

Basically here is what I am wondering:

Should I keep trying to use the live version or build my own with the minimal ubuntu iso?

and

Should I keep with the usb flash disk, get a small (8GB) SSD, or just give up the idea of a diskless (noise) HTPC? My goal is to have a diskless HTPC and have all my media on my server in the office mounted via NFS, SMB, etc.

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Noodle]

I have a diskless HTPC setting just like yours. The system is on a 4G usb flash drive, and it runs very well. I use Linux system to make live-rw file (Not sure, but I don't remember there's ".img" ext name). And I use unetbootin on Linux as well. XBMC Live support SMB already, you need to install NFS package in order to support NFS, but that's pretty simple.

One thing is: don't make live-rw file too big, normally there's no much thing need to write into this file system unless you want to install lot of another staff. Most XBMC user data went to /home/xbmc/.xbmc/ folder, and in XBMC Live, that folder is actually a symbol link to your USB sticker /dotXBMC folder. So, it write to your FAT32 file system directly. This file system (in live-rw file) will hold log files, your configuration (/etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/fstab for example), extra Fonts. And in order to use NFS, you will need to install NFS package into it as well.

I have 600M live-rw, but I think 400M should be more than enough. (I have NFS package installed)

Oh, BTW, sometimes, after I restart the HTPC, NFS mount in /etc/fstab didn't mounted automatically, I had to use SSH login and run command "sudo mount -a" manually. Fortunately, I can do it from my iPhone. Otherwise, it gonna to be pain since as HTPC, I don't have keyboard connect to it.

I'm pretty happy with this solution and not planning to install it to another USB flash drive.

[Noodle]

BTW, I even installed Apple Movie Trailer and YouTube plugins, they all works fine.

[kameleon25]

Thanks for the input. I will try again once I get my server issues sorted out (just had a drive drop out of an LVM and it is wreaking havoc!). I was trying to make the image file 2-3GB so that may have been part of the issue.

[kameleon25]

Also, I just noticed you said that you had your usb disk formatted Fat32.... Mine is formatted in NTFS so that may be part of my booting issue.

[Noodle]

Yes, most of boot loader, grub4dos for example, do not support NFS. Use FAT32.