[HunterZ]

So Clonezilla was a HUGE pain to get booting from SD (I don't have a CD/DVD drive to connect to the HTPC to install from). I ended up having to use 'dd' on my Linux workstation to load the Clonezilla-SysRescCD ISO onto the SD card, and then it booted fine. Backup took a couple hours for 250GB (to a 30GB compressed archive), probably due to a combination of slow-ish HDDs and powerline networking adapters.

Installed XBMC Live to the HDD and boot time is 30-45 seconds, which is a significant improvement over Windows 7 and XBMC Live on the SD card.

Added the following to ~/.asoundsrc and it seems to have fixed the missing menu sounds (this seems like a real bug/omission in XBMC Live):

Code:

pcm.!default {
        type hw
        card 0
        device 3
        channels 2
}

ctl.!default {
        type hw
        card 0
        device 3
        channels 2
}

This messed up my sound output settings in the XBMC settings menus, but after putting everything back to HDMI it all seems to be working fine.

I also installed ssh for remote access via PuTTY and/or Linux. I also did a 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade', which upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS to 10.04.3 LTS and upgraded over 80 packages (including the Linux kernel, nvidia drivers, etc.). I haven't noticed any good or bad effects of this.

Had lots of trouble importing the database I had exported from Windows:

• First of all, the XBMC Live importer can't browse to network locations, and I can't seem to add any sources. This left two options: either use Linux to mount the samba share with the database export and then browse to the mount point, or push the database export files to XBMC Live's local filesystem. Having recently gone through the headaches of getting SMB/CIFS mounting to work perfectly in Linux, I decided to instead do the push method via FileZilla SFTP from my desktop to the HTPC.
  
• Once I got the files onto the HTPC and imported the library (which went fine), I wasn't able to play any of the videos. This turned out to be my fault for editing the database export to point to a smb:// path instead of a mounted drive letter; this isn't inherently bad, but I pointed at a slightly wrong path that didn't have Everyone permissions set on the Windows host.
  
• After I fixed the permissions issue, I was able to view movies but not pull up the Info screen for them. TV Shows worked fine. I think this turned out to be due to XBMC somehow breaking the mapping between the source list and the individual movie entries in the database. I tried deleting and recreating the source list, as I remembered having set it up a little differently on the old Windows install that I exported from, but this didn't help. I'm still not able to pull up movie info for existing entries, and an update scan is causing duplicate entries to be added (for which the info screen does work, thankfully). I guess I'll have to just treat this as a movie database rebuild and clean out the old entries at the end (provided that the latter can be done in one fell swoop via the Clean Database function). This means I'll lose the data on which movies I've watched, but that's not nearly as important as the watched data for TV shows that was thankfully preserved.

I'm wondering if maybe the sources have to be set up perfectly before doing the import, and if there's no way to fix things after the fact other than clearing out the database, fixing the sources, and re-importing. I'm not sure if I want to bother trying this (I probably will once I see that my customized Star Wars ISO entries have all been replaced with generic scraper entries).

The Weather functionality seems to be broken; the weather screen is not showing any data even when I force a refresh. It could be because I installed the advanced weather plugin, whose features I can't seem to access from anywhere.

I also noticed that the YouTube plugin is staying at v2.1.3, even though a new version was supposed to have been added to the official addon repo recently. Fortunately I don't think I've had the login issue that the new version is supposed to fix. Edit: Apparently the new version is pre-Eden only, and some say it doesn't fix the login issue anyways.

I still think I'll be happier with this XBMC Live install than I was with the Windows one, once I get the kinks worked out.