Kodi Community Forum

Hi All,

I'm a total n00b to Linux however I've successfully installed 8.04 and have compiled XBMC and it works!

What my question is though is this..

I used a P4 1.8GHz originally 512MB RAM but found another 128MB Stick that I threw in so a total 640MB it has onboard graphics (I did try an old Geforce MX400 but it killed my install with the drivers)

The XBMC GUI runs like a dream and plays music fine but if I set a Visualisation it will cause a lot of jittering so I checked the System info and noticed that there is approx 5MB available - the rest is in use.

I know the quick fix for this is more memory but when I checked my XBMC on my XBOX this only uses about 32MB RAM so I thought what is using up all that memory.

Can anyone else share how much memory they are using or advise if there is anything I can do to slim down the memory usage?

Many Thanks

Ryan

Linux will use most available RAM for things like file cache, so not seeing any free RAM on a system that's been up for a little while is normal.

You can use a command like

$ vmstat 1

If you consistently see numbers in the swap columns above zero, you might have a shortage of memory. I'd take a guess and say your server more CPU bound than memory bound though.

Gnome (the Desktop environment) in Ubuntu is quite resource heavy.
Gnome is not needed to run XBMC but it's a bit harder to setup without it.
Here's some reading on howto set this up
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=32046 and http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=32891

Another option is to try the LiveXBMC which is the the absolutely minimum to run XBMC.

none of these approaches are the simplest. Hope you get it working though.
Still I must say I'm intriged that you got it working with MX440! that must be the lowest I've seen it run on? how good does it run? no problems with video and such?

A simpler solution might be to use OpenBox or fluxbox with GDM (Login manager), won't be as fast in boot and have alittle resource overhead (neglectable). https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Openbox

What chipset exactly is the onboard graphics? The MX440 will run, in linux anyway, if you use either the xorg driver ("nv" no hope for XBMC like this) or the nvidia-legacy binary driver (some hope for XBMC). When I tried to run XBMC with mine it worked fine for music with vis but XBMC died when trying to play video. After "upgrading" to a GF5200 I found this to likely be a bug in another dependency under Gentoo, but haven't had a chance to swap the cards back and try it.