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Hey everyone,
I just downloaded and installed the latest (live) ISO to a virtual machine. Everything seems to load fine up to the point where a login prompt appears (command-line). After this it switches to a screen with an "X" in the center.. then back to the login prompt. It continues doing this in a loop with 2 second intervals.
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Welcome to the magical world of XBMC screen loops. It's a common theme here in the forums. It won't run under the MS virtual PC. If you want to run it on your windblowes PC, I would suggest you download the actual windows installer. I've been fighting it for a week now trying to get ANY sort of Linux build to work without success. I don't think the actual Linux stuff is even out of alpha yet!
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Well I'm actually using VirtualBox on Ubuntu Intrepid.. I can get the "Linux Version" of XBMC working just fine, no problem, but I'd rather have a dedicated install of XBMC instead of a standalone program. Does this screen looping problem only happen in virtual machines?
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Nope, it has happened with every install of the thing I have tried, with the exception of the windows version. It appears to me that somehow they have rewritten X to start XBMC, or some sort of X shell (only way i can describe it). I can run X without XBMC just fine, but try and load XBMC and I get the screen loops from hell.
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Sorry, I'm still a little confused.
Thanks for telling me XBMC can't run on a virtual machine, I understand that now. However, I'm going to have a dedicated (physical) machine to (hopefully) install XBMC on. I don't want to have to boot from a flash drive or from a DVD to run XBMC. I'd as might as well just use the standalone program if that's the case (though, I'd rather not). Does anyone succeed in installing XBMC to the hard drive? Or is that just something unheard of? XBMC is probably the most appealing, free, multimedia center "OS", I'd really prefer to install this over MythTV, GeexBox, or LinuxMCE.
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rwparris2
Team-XBMC Python Developer
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XBMC Live will install to a Harddrive.
It will also eat all of your partitions and destroy all your data, so make sure that drive is only for XBMC and doesn't have anything you want on it.
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I´ve spent the last couple of days looking for a way to install XBMC in a KVM virtual machine so I could have it as a centralized media center for my home network, together with other VMs, sharing the same KVM server. The idea was to stream audio and video via UnPn from the main server.
The major problem I found googling around (and here) refered to the fact that it would be almost impossible to run (and setup) xmbc over a remote conection to the virtual machine guest, since xbmc requires a 3D graphic support, which is not available on VMs based on the KVM plataform.
The possible alternatives I´ve found included the instalation of OpenGL libraries in the host machine, which seemed quite complicated to me.
Another possible solution, also not easy, would be via the VMGL software.
I followed a different path and did some tests with Windows 7 and Ubuntu desktop runing as guests.
Following are the results:
- in the first test I installed xbmc in a real PC as an application runing on top of Windows 7 and acessed it via Remote Connection.
If I started xbmc in full screen mode it would not appear in the remote conection window. However, if xbmc is started in a window ("\" command) of the remote PC, it is possible to see it perfectly in the remote conection application.
- the second test was to repeat the above but in a Windows 7 guest in a KVM server.
In this case when I started the xbmc application I received an Application::Create() error and xbmc did not started.
According to what I found in many discussion lists around, this error is due to the lack of xDirect 3D support in the Windows guest VM.
- in the third test, I tried with a Ubuntu desktop guest VM instead.
Although the xbmc application started, the display was sort of fuzzy (b&w and duplicated columns).
Therefore it was impossible to setup xbmc, eventhough it was running.
But, during my tests with Windows 7 guest, I found that there was a graphic display driver from VMWare that was possible to install in windows and replace the default Cirrus Logic driver that comes with QEMU/KVM.
I decided to change the Ubuntu vm display driver for the vga vmware
(in the KVM configurantion file in the host machine) and it worked perfectly!
Apparently Ubuntu Desktop guest has a driver for the vmware vga display which works (in a widowed xbmc display in the remote guest).
So, now I can VNC to my Ubuntu Desktop VM and remotely operate the XBMC application. The performance for playing videos is not good, but I my intention was only to access the xbmc vm to configure and manage it as a UnPn server.
My harware and software platform are as follows:
Motherboard: GEForce 6100PM-M2_V2 (which has a integrated NVIDIA 3D GPU)
Operating System: ProxMox VE, based on Debian with KVM (runs and manages the VMs)
Guest OS: Ubuntu Desktop 10.10
Application: XBMC 10.1
Remote Access: UtraVNC (to the VNC server at the Ubuntu guest).
ProxMox VE has also a VNC console (java-plugin) to access their VMs.
Jose
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correct. It works fine in vmware player as well as virtual box. Possibly depending on the host hw, but it is BS that it can't run in vm.
