[Soulfly]

Hi I just compiled an xbmc with ubuntu 7.10 and it works quite well. But I need to start xbmc as root user is there any way to get around this.

My hardware on this:
Fujitsu-Siemens Laptop V3205 Intel Core Duo T5100 1,8 GHz
2 GB RAM
Intel Gfx with mesa drivers

Try this:

$ sudo chown u+s xboxmediacenter

this will run xboxmediacenter as root even if you start is as a normal user. Beware that this is bad for security, you should keep these things down to a minimum.

One good solution should be to make a good SE-linux policy for xboxmediacenter and then educate the rest of us how you did it :-)