[darwin]

1. I'm configuring my Live installation via PuTTY... how do I use 'wget' with those drop.io links to download the drivers.

You may have to :

"
apt-get install wget
"

After that, just :

"
wget "http://example.url.notice.the.surrounding.quotes.com/bleh.file.ext"
"

2. I've installed the new Camelot B1 to play with, and without the xboxdrv userspace driver, XBMC at least correctly identifies A and B on my Xbox1 Logitech wireless controller. Is there any reason why we still need xboxdrv if the default installation can read the old Xbox controllers?
...
3. Xbox 1 and Xbox 360 controller support seems to be common request (judging from the number of posts in the support forum). How come it hasn't been rolled into the default install? Why is it still so difficult (for us n00bs)?

If the default installation can read your controller, I strongly recommend using that. It is probably supporting your xbox1 controller via the "xpad" kernel module. I don't use an xbox1 controller, so I don't know whether it works "out of the box" in linux XBMC or not. I know that my xbox360 wireless controller did *not* work out of the box in XBMC linux/live 9.04 and that's why I put together this package.

As to why the xboxdrv version of driver support has not been included in the default install, well, it requires certain kernel modules (uinput, joydev) to be loaded and it also requires compiling xboxdrv. I presume that even if the XBMC mainline project devs were inclined to go with an xboxdrv solution versus a more generic solution, it would still take entirely non-trivial work to make sure the bundled-in version works properly.

=darwin