The other day I received my Zotac Zbox HD-ID11, and have been getting it set up with XBMC Live. Throughout the process, these forums have been invaluable, and I appreciate the help that everyone provides here.
Since this is perhaps the first box out there with next-gen ION and Atom D510, I figure that a lot of people will start picking them up soon. Now that I have everything (mostly) working, I thought I would compile all of the information that I used into one guide to help others like me.
Disclaimer: Just to be clear, I am not a Linux nor XBMC expert. I know just enough to really be dangerous. I take no responsibility for anything negative that happens as a result of these instructions. If any Linux gurus out there have any feedback or suggestions, I would be happy to update this accordingly.
Upgrading the BIOS:
Overall, this is an outstanding piece of hardware. The most popular complaint that I have seen people raise, is the fact that the fan blows too loud, and comes on too much. Thankfully, there is already a BIOS update that drastically improved that for me. Of course, updating the BIOS is serious business, so proceed with caution when executing these instructions. Caveat emptor if you will.
Download the latest
BIOS version
Download the
HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
Download
DOS-on-USB.
Extract all of these downloaded archives
Start up the HP tool.
Under "Device" choose your USB drive from the drop-down.
For "File System" select FAT32.
Check "Create a DOS startup disk."
Select the folder with the extracted DOS-on-USB files for "using system files located at"
Click Start.
Now you have a bootable dosk USB disk.
Next you need to copy the afudos.exe and A140PA20.rom (file name may be slightly different if you download a newer version since the time of this writing.)
Plug in the USB stick to the Zbox, and turn it on. Go into the BIOS by repeatedly pressing DEL when you see the Zotac banner. Make sure the USB has first boot priority.
The DOS-on-USB will try to prompt you to install DOS to the HDD. We don't need to do that, just hit Cancel or whatever you need to get out of that, and you should be returned to a DOS prompt (basically a blinking cursor in front of C:\)
Now enter the following:
Code:
AFUDOS A140PA20.ROM /B /P /N /X /C
Creating a USB disk image:
I did this using Windows, although there are other ways to do it.
First download the
XBMC Live image and
unetbootin.
Open unetbootin by clicking the exe.
Select the "disk image" radio button and ISO from the drop down menu. Then browse to the XBMC Live image.
At the bottom make sure "USB Drive" is selected, and select your USB drive from the drop down (this obviously assumes you have already plugged in your USB drive).
Click OK.
Installing XBMC Live using USB:
Insert the USB drive into one of the slots on the Zotac case, and turn it on.
If you have a new, blank/unformatted HDD installed it should just boot straight to the USB stick. However, to be sure you can go into the BIOS by mashing the DEL key when the Zotac logo comes up on the screen. In the BIOS, go to the Boot tab, and adjust the settings as necessary to make sure the USB drive has first boot priority.
When prompted, select the option to "Install to hard drive" and follow the instructions on the screen to install XBMC. Along the way, it will ask you to create a username and password, xbmc is commonly used for both.
Configuring networking:
The first thing I did was configure Wifi, as I unfortunately don't have a place for a wired connection in my room. Wired networking seemed to work out of the box for me.
The wireless card is an Atheros AR9285. Download the latest driver available
here.
Assuming you don't have any networking options yet, you'll have to put this on a USB drive to get it onto your Zotac machine.
Insert the USB drive that contains the driver you downloaded into the machine. Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to enter a command line interface. The USB drive should automatically mount, just look for it by entering:
From the output of ls you should see something like "removable disk," "external," etc. Navigate to it and copy the driver over (for me the driver file was called "compat-wireless-2.6.35.tar.bz2":
Code:
cd external
cp compat-wireless-2.6.35.tar.bz2 /home/xbmc
cd
Now that we have the driver file in our home directory we can unpack and install it (be patient, this will take a while):
Code:
tar -xf compat-wireless-2.6.35.tar.bz2
cd compat-wireless-2.6.35.tar.bz2
make
sudo make install
sudo make unload
sudo modprobe ath9k
Reboot.
Now we just need to add it to /etc/network/interfaces so that it starts up by default:
Code:
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
This should bring up a text file. If there is a line in it that says "auto eth0" you'll need to add a # sign in front of it.
Add the following to the file, obviously, replacing the relevant values with your own:
Code:
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid yournetworkname
wireless-key yournetworkkey
wireless-channel 11
wireless-mode managed
Now just enter this:
Code:
/etc/init.d/networking restart
And Wifi should be up and running. To verify though, type "ifconfig" and make sure you have an ip address. Also try pinging google.com to make sure you can access the internet.
Code:
ping google.com -c 4
Install NVIDIA Proprietary Drivers and Update Alsa for Audio Over HDMI:
Cr0nos' instructions worked like a charm for me. Just follow them to the letter.
Note that I tried the instructions for this
on Anandtech as well as the instructions on
Zotac's website. Both were already out of date when I tried them, cr0nos' instructions worked great, no patching required.
Hiding the Mouse Cursor:
I had the annoying issue of having the mouse cursor sitting in the middle of the screen, and it would never go away. I think there are a number of ways to fix this known issue, but for me it was simple enough to do the following:
Add this line under the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Code:
Option "HWCursor" "false"
Suspend/Wake issues:
Here I'm stuck. I can suspend to RAM without any issues, and when I press the power button it will wake. However, I am having two issues:
1. When waking, I lose network capability, and no IP address. I have to reboot or /etc/init.d/networking restart.
2. I cannot wake with the IR remote. The IR receiver usually flashes when it receives a signal, but I get no red flashes during suspend.
I've tried going through the steps on
the wiki, I've tried adding SUSPEND_MODULES=ath9k to /etc/pm/config.d/madwifi as
described here, and I've gone through
this guide, with no luck.
If anybody has any troubleshooting suggestions, I'd be happy to update this.