Kodi Community Forum

Why is it that only some of my skins can be selected and others are simply greyed out on my XBMC ubuntu installation? I'm using the same files on my windows install, and it works perfectly.

Make sure that the skins that are grayed out are not within an additional sub-folder of the original skin folder:

Xperience
----> Xperience
---------> [Skin Stuff]

I've had this happen to me twice. XBMC does look any further down in the folder structure than:

.xbmc/skin/[Skin]

My skins are stored in /usr/share/xbmc/skin/skinname (something like that, off my head)

There are the same skins I use from my Windows install, just a drag and drop into the linux skin folder. I'd love to stick with Aeon Stark, but it runs pretty laggy in the Grid view on my Acer Aspire Revo.

Bump. This is very annoying. I double checked all the skin files, and everything seems correct.

I can't even unrar the files on ubuntu because there is no good unraring program. The one I have refuses to unrar the files, so I do everything on my windows machine.

xecutionx Wrote:Bump. This is very annoying. I double checked all the skin files, and everything seems correct.

I can't even unrar the files on ubuntu because there is no good unraring program. The one I have refuses to unrar the files, so I do everything on my windows machine.

Make sure to unrar from terminal. If you do it using a GUI it may not recognize filenames with spaces in them.

Stieffers Wrote:Make sure to unrar from terminal. If you do it using a GUI it may not recognize filenames with spaces in them.

I opted to unrar it from my windows machine. I just test the skin on my windows machine and if I like it, I put the whole folder on a usb drive and copy it over to my linux box into the skin folder.

I get 'We require skins of version 2.10 or higher' on the linux box, but it works just fine on windows. You can imagine my frustration, lol, as I checked all the directories and everything adds up.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong. To get these files into the correct folder I have to run as root. So I gksu nautilus in terminal to open a graphical root interface for nautilus and just browse to the correct location from there. Then I am able to drag and drop the skins without a permission error. But most skins don't work, only a few I tried.

Lmao, I love this. I just did a complete reinstall of Ubuntu and XBMC and this problem still exists.

Hi,

Could you please open terminal and do "ls -al" in skin directory and show the output and provide the username that you run xbmc from.

1. You need to put any new skins in /home/youruser/.xbmc/skin
2. Not sure what problems you're having with rar, but you should just be able to right-click on the rar file and choose "extract here"

xecutionx Wrote:Lmao, I love this. I just did a complete reinstall of Ubuntu and XBMC and this problem still exists.

that suggests to me that the problem is with the skin itself. i had the same symptoms as you recently and i resolved it by changing the defaultresolution field in the skin.xml file. pretty esoteric.

anyway, we might have an easier time if you would enable debugging and pastebin a log file:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=34655

Please do an ls -la of your skin folder, and then an ls -la of the xperience skin folder as well.

Post both outputs here, and also do the logfile suggested in the post above this.

Well, the more correct location for the skins on linux is

/home/[username]/.xbmc/skin

You already have permission to write there, so it's less hassle.

/usr/share/xbmc/skin

is the actual installation directory, but in order to write in this location you have to change permissions on the folder

chmod -R 777 /usr/share/xbmc/skin

hogfan Wrote:Well, the more correct location for the skins on linux is

/home/[username]/.xbmc/skin

You already have permission to write there, so it's less hassle.

And due to the fact xecutionx said that he had to move files as root, suggests that owner and owners's group may be wery well something else than the user that runs xbmx. That would have to be first thing to check. And by the way, if things have not changed in the *nix world largely in the late years and I have missed some drastic development, /usr/share is meant for static data and I cannot think any reasonable scenario that would require normal user to write there. And on the side note I would not recommend changing permissions to 777 anywhere in the system, It would be better to use group permissions and assing user to specific group that has rights to do things A, B and C. This applies in both Linux and Windows.

mpukki Wrote:And due to the fact xecutionx said that he had to move files as root, suggests that owner and owners's group may be wery well something else than the user that runs xbmx.

My thought exactly, which is why I wanted a ls -l print.

But for OP, this command should ensure the proper rights on the folder:
sudo chown -R xbmc:xbmc /home/xbmc/.xbmc/skin

If the user that runs XBMC isn't named "xbmc", then just change the command accordingly. I.e. if xbmc runs under the local user named "john", then the command would be:
sudo chown -R john:john /home/john/.xbmc/skin

Okay, I tried placing the skin files in the appropriate user folder, none of the skins work except the default. Rapier, Aeon Aurigia and Alaska all give me the error 'We require skins of version 2.10 or higher'. Its very frustrating, to say the least. This is the last thing I thought I'd have problems with. What is a 'ls -la'? What is the exact command you want me to do? I'm new to ubuntu.

I'm so sorry for all the bumps, but I mean, I got everything else to work and it is extremely frustrating to know that this little thing is holding me back. These files work PERFECTLY on my Windows XBMC install, so it can't be the files.