gyrene2083 Wrote:I'm not trying to hijack this thread so forgive me if it comes across that way, but I didn't want to start a new thread since my question is kind of similar.
I have XBMC running on my shuttle with a nvidia 9400gt card. my OS is Win 2008 server. I've had it running for some time, but I have noticed it stutters at times and after a reset I'm good to go. I'm curious if I should dump win 2008 and go with Ubuntu. I had it setup initially many years ago with ubuntu but I had problems getting it to see my windows server, which was hosting my media.
So, I'm curious what are the benefits if I do so now. Again I don't mean to hijack the thread, and if I come across as doing so I apologize.
regardless of OS, xbmc uses an application based SMB (meaning the smb functionality and the code to support SMB are compiled into the xbmc appl and are not reliant on the underlying OS to provide that function), so if you have SMB server shares configured correctly, xbmc client configured correctly, your network on the underlying OS configured correctly, xbmc can see and access your windows shares independent of the OS.
Regarding linux connecting to a windows host, outside of xbmc, you need to learn how CIFS works under linux, it works well once it is configured correctly but you have to cross that learning curve, which can be a barrier to the uninitiated.
Lastly under openelec, to ease use by non linux users, they have created smb shares so windows hosts can mount those shares to get to configuration and data files one might be interested in accessing, but this assumes your underlying SMB network is configured correctly and you have put that configuration information correctly in your openelec configuration. If you are concerned about accessing SMB shares in openelec, well that is addressed by XBMC's integrated SMB functionality or if you prefer to mount SMB shares outside of XBMC, you just modify the ~/.config/netmount.conf file mount your shares to the filesystem, examples are in file.