Kodi Community Forum

I'm trying to convert an old Dell Inspiron 5160 laptop with a bad LCD panel into a usable XBMC machine running Ubuntu. While I am licensed to use Windows XP on that machine, I'd prefer to stick to Ubuntu if possible.

When I first tried to run XBMC (SVN) on the machine, the machine was basically unresponsive trying to even scroll the text on XBMC. I'm not sure if this machine does not have enough power or if it is the fact that the NVidia driver offered for installation is downlevel (NVidia 173). My glxinfo shows among other things:

OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce FX Go5200/AGP/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 173.14.12
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

Would an upgrade to version 180 version of the NVidia driver be enough to get this machine running reasonably or am I just out of luck in trying to use this machine? Would installing it back to Windows XP make a difference? I've seen in the documentation that OpenGL 2.0 is preferred and this driver doesn't appear to support that, thus I'm hoping I just need to go through the steps to upgrade the driver. I just don't want to go through the effort to be disappointed.

Thanks,
Craig

Looking at the NVidia release notes for the particular card, it appears that the 173 driver is the last driver I can use for this video card. Does that imply that I'm out of luck or are there things I can do to get XBMC to run reasonably on this hardware?

To follow up on my own posting... It appears that things run ok on Windows, so I'm in the process of building out the box using Windows instead of Linux.