[modern69messiah]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of customizing my setup and working out some kinks but one thing that has been top of my list is improving my boot times. Obviously going along of XBMCBuntu would be best but I am using MythTV along with MythBox (eventually anyway) and would like full functionality desktop environment to fall back to for debugging, addition of new features if the need arises.

Now I am fairly new to Linux in general so I was wondering what alternatives to KDE or GNOME people may be using or would recommend to help in this goal?

Would say using a lighter weight manager cripple anything with XBMC or MythTV? What kind of mileage can I expect from say XFCE or the like?

I am posting about this over on the Ubuntu forums but I thought maybe putting it here would serve a good purpose as the main question I have is obviously its potential draw backs to XBMC!

Any suggestions, information and general advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

EDIT: I seem to remember a more drastic solution involving stopping X from running at all until XBMC was launched. I thought I bookmarked it but I cannot for the life of me find it! Anyone know where it could be?

[vajonam]

i used the ubuntu netbook distro. So that I can control my HDTV using a WII controller (for a mouse). and then the usual harmony remote for XBMC.

the netbook remix works great for the HDTV everything is just a few clicks away and is nicely organized.

[wstewart]

I use fluxbox. It is light weight. I install a command line system (alt install I think its called), then install fluxbox. With as few steps you can get it to auto login.

[modern69messiah]

I'm trying to avoid having to rebuild my system so a new distro is out of the question - though if I have to rebuild for some reason I'll look into it then.

I'll start looking round at fluxbox as it has been recommended on the Ubuntu forums as well. Hopefully it's not too much messing about!

[crego]

I'm running Ubuntu and done the following and it works well for me. From memory, I couldn't detail all the steps right now but if it interests you, I could probably trace my steps backwards.

Roughly speaking, I had an old computer (recently upgraded) that just ran Ubuntu and served as a 24/7 home net server (running apache, mysql, etc.) - used to access media files from the original Xbox/xbmc through smb shares.

I had disabled gdm (that's for Gnome, I believe there's something similar for KDE called kdm) which is an x-based login manager, and boot up only to a console.

Once I got the beefier hardware and decided to put xbmc on it, I followed some steps I found here or elsewhere so that I have a user ("htpc") that automatically starts its own x session with xbmc being the only app that runs (i.e., no window manager) when it logs in, and this login automatically happens upon boot. The .xinitrc (which is a script that gets called to startup x programs) has some looping in it so that even if xbmc or that x session crashes, it restarts.

Because my old hardware wasn't up to running something as "heavy" as KDE, I've been using xfce4 for a few years. I use it on my laptop as well. I've played around with other options, including fluxbox, but stuck with xfce4. For my needs, it's more than adequate, even on the new hardware that easily runs the latest kde. From my perspective, a lot of these desktop environments try to do much more than I generally need and there's no
reason to have them slow down the system.

So now that I've blabbered on, I'll try and wrap things up by suggesting you try xfce4 and if it works for you, stop there. If you want to kind of have your cake and eat it to, I'd suggest trying an approach like mine and not running any window manager unless you need to. You probably don't have a need to run both xbmc and a browser at the same time so a multiple login option might work for you like it is for me.

[modern69messiah]

Nice post crego...I think that's what i was trying to get onto at the end of my original post. In fact on an old build I did have it running, but I could not get it to auto login, which defeated the purpose. I know there was a thread on here somewhere detailing it, I just cannot find it :-(

If you know where it is that would be fantastic, but if not I'd really appreciated a detailed step-by-step guide....though I have some better keywords to search for so wait until I post again

Thanks a tonne!

EDIT:

Found it!

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

I had problems with editing tty1 as it was empty when I opened it. But I didn't try going any further because I knew I was about to trash the whole system anyway.

[crego]

That post looks familiar, I found this one in my bookmarks (which in turn references yours) http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=43404

I don't remember running into any issues. I have my setup using tty6 instead of tty1 and my user is "htpc" instead of "xbmc". All the tty* files in my /etc/event.d directory have something in them, odd that yours doesn't. Typo maybe?

[modern69messiah]

Yeah I'll probably try the method I listed as it seems more simple - but I will borrow from the other one especially in the case of the system locking up.

I have a completely new install of Ubuntu (on different hardware as well now) so maybe the tty thingy will be fine. I will ened to research it a little bit as I'm a little lost on the differences between all the tty users or whatever they are and how they are used

[crego]

I could be wrong but I don't think there's much to the ttys; I tend to think of them as a console-based way to multitask, doing Alt-FNx to switch between them, then you typically have your X session running on virtual terminal 7.

[modern69messiah]

Yeah agreed. I did some reading on them yesterday and I don't think there's much to it. Touch wood lol.

[wstewart]

If you have ubuntu already installed you won't need to re-build or re-install your system. Just use apt-get to install fluxbox.