[sraue]

Hi all,

i will give you an look at my selfmade (from scratch) linux distribution to start XBMC. It boots very fast (i hope i can do this faster) and needs at the moment around 45MB on any flash card or hard disk drive. On the video you cannot see an bootloader ( i use extlinux for this) so i have integrated an ugly welcome message. this message is displayed direct after kernel has booted (around 1 sec.). so you can see if OpenELEC is fast enough for you. I will plan an release in next time, but i must fix some issues first. OpenELEC starts also an Samba server, ssh server and some services needed for running (udev, hal, dbus, avahi, syslog, networking, hardware detection). For more informations see http://www.openelec.tv (in progress)

look here if you want: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=una1mYC3h1E

many greetings and thanks to xbmc developers for help

Stephan

[leigh_munro]

thats pretty impressive.... wonder if this could work on the appletv?

[rwparris2]

Awesome
Out of curiousity, how does the speed of this compare to xbmc live?

I'd love to see a 'powered by xbmc' somewhere on your spash screen if using XBMC is the entire point of your distro.

[sraue]

Awesome
Out of curiousity, how does the speed of this compare to xbmc live?

i dont know exactly, i never used xbmc-live to boot from harddisk. but i think its much slower

I'd love to see a 'powered by xbmc' somewhere on your spash screen if using XBMC is the entire point of your distro.

this video is only an "technical preview" - i have some issue to fix before i make an release. i want also an great theme and an better splash (with an better logo) - and some python scripts - if anyone can help me with this?

[estyx]

this video is only an "technical preview" - i have some issue to fix before i make an release. i want also an great theme and an better splash (with an better logo) - and some python scripts - if anyone can help me with this?

Just shout out what ya need the scripts to do and I'll see what I can do, if not there's probably someone else who can help out I was working on a distro myself based on Moblin but I just dont have the time, but I'm more that willing to help out on your project

[Evanrich]

Awesome
Out of curiousity, how does the speed of this compare to xbmc live?

I'd love to see a 'powered by xbmc' somewhere on your spash screen if using XBMC is the entire point of your distro.

on my zotac Ion 330 board, it takes exactly 27 seconds from pushing the power button, to getting to the Alaska screen. (part of that is putting 0 seconds for the boot menu screen). I hope to drop this down even further with the new SSD I just bought for my box (as my fujitsu laptop hard drive reads a max of 29MB/sec, hopeing the SSD will be faster. regardless, I see 27 seconds as being fairly fast already.

[sraue]

I hope to drop this down even further with the new SSD I just bought for my box (as my fujitsu laptop hard drive reads a max of 29MB/sec, hopeing the SSD will be faster. regardless, I see 27 seconds as being fairly fast already.

why do you buy an ssd if you have an NAS? look here:
http://www.innodisk.com/production.jsp?flashid=92
http://www.innodisk.com/production.jsp?flashid=41
http://www.innodisk.com/production.jsp?flashid=29
http://www.innodisk.com/production.jsp?flashid=34

but this is not all. i have build an minimal distro with only Software need to run xbmc so i have an image from 45MB (in the moment). i have optimized loading of services and drivers. for example: Xorg starts at beginning as any of the very first services. Xorg is als optimizied to start quick. in parallel of xorg starts hardwaredetection and all needed for xbmc to run, then all that is not need to run xbmc, then xbmc parallel to this (and if xorgs is running). all services that not depends on any other service starts parallel. i can this also make a little bit faster if i move all drivers statically to kernel. this can i do if i have an limited hardwaresupport. i also plan to integrate coreboot so i have an boottime from max. around 7 sec. from poweron to xbmc. but this only possible with a few mainboards.

[sraue]

Just shout out what ya need the scripts to do and I'll see what I can do, if not there's probably someone else who can help out I was working on a distro myself based on Moblin but I just dont have the time, but I'm more that willing to help out on your project

i need an program to update my distro from internet for new releases.
my release is packed to eg. OpenELEC-xxx-yyy-zzz.tar.bz2 and avaible at e.g http://releases.openelec.tv/xxx/yyy
xxx is an hardware or project id (appletv/generic/or an special project id)
yyy is devel or release
zzz is an versionsnumber
-this program looks at /etc/release for xxx, yyy, zzz which version is installed (automatically if xbmc is online, or if user want) and compare this with the latest version on http://releases.openelec.tv/xxx/yyy
- download to /var/tmp and extract this to /storage/.update (/storage is $HOME and is the only location of OpenELEC.tv with write support where data can be stored. /var is also r/w but this is an ramdisk and data will be lost after reboot)
- display an message to xbmc (i think this is possible via dbus) that the update is downloaded/extracted and user must reboot for install the update.
the installation of updates stored to /storage/.update after reboot is already implemented.
- user can setup if this program looks on every startup/ periodically/ or only on user request for updates

can you or anyone do this for me - i think its not very hard?

[sraue]

I'd love to see a 'powered by xbmc' somewhere on your spash screen if using XBMC is the entire point of your distro.

How this looks?

http://openelec.tv/index.php/gallerie.html

[Swifty]

Excellent looking project, can't wait to give this a try and see how fast I can get my Acer Revo booting!

All we need now is a way to power on from cold via remote

[sraue]

All we need now is a way to power on from cold via remote

there are IR Receivers for USB with power on funktion if the PC is switched off. This needs an USB port aktivated power if pc is switched off (there are many boards with this - some cane enable this feature in bios or per jumper). you can test this with an USB optical mouse (NOT cordless). if there are an light if pc is switched off you have this function. there are also receiver for RS232

IR Receiver looks like this:
http://www.atric.de/IR-Einschalter/index.php
http://www.simerec.com/PCS-2.html
http://www.serasidis.gr/circuits/InReCoMe/InReCoMe.htm
http://www.ocinside.de/go_e.html?http://...eiver.html
http://xir.us/xireasy.aspx

[Evanrich]

why do you buy an ssd if you have an NAS? look here:
http://www.innodisk.com/production.jsp?flashid=92
http://www.innodisk.com/production.jsp?flashid=41
http://www.innodisk.com/production.jsp?flashid=29
http://www.innodisk.com/production.jsp?flashid=34

but this is not all. i have build an minimal distro with only Software need to run xbmc so i have an image from 45MB (in the moment). i have optimized loading of services and drivers. for example: Xorg starts at beginning as any of the very first services. Xorg is als optimizied to start quick. in parallel of xorg starts hardwaredetection and all needed for xbmc to run, then all that is not need to run xbmc, then xbmc parallel to this (and if xorgs is running). all services that not depends on any other service starts parallel. i can this also make a little bit faster if i move all drivers statically to kernel. this can i do if i have an limited hardwaresupport. i also plan to integrate coreboot so i have an boottime from max. around 7 sec. from poweron to xbmc. but this only possible with a few mainboards.

sole reason I'm going with an SSD (87$ 16GB SSD) is just to improve XBMC's loading time. I have no need to improve movie/tv playing speed, as my NAS already can stream 650Mbps across my gigabit network, so I'm just trying to get XBMC to boot as fast as humanely possible. I love how fast your system starts up, if it becomes a user-friendly *read: very linux-noob friendly* and can support lirc, I'd definately switch, as it looks like it's booting in about 10 seconds. My ultimate goal is to have an "almost instant on" box.

[estyx]

Can you upload the image somewhere? Would be really nice to play around with it a bit

[Jaken]

When this is getting ready. I would love support for appleTV. This is precisely what the aTV needs.

[sraue]

Can you upload the image somewhere? Would be really nice to play around with it a bit

the image at the moment only support intel hardware (incl. intel graphic). when you need support for other hardware we (i or you) must change the configuration. but then we must recompile the distro. what you need? the image or do you want compile the distribution (then you can make changes, and i can include this)

for the sources you can go to https://code.launchpad.net/~sraue/openelec/devel
there is also an bugtracker for bugs, an tracker for feature requests and so on... you can use this platform and i would be happy if anyone can help me a little bit to fix my bugs or include more hardware (i am have only intel systems for testing) or make documentation for the buildprocess etc...

to get the sources install bazar and get it with

Code:

bzr branch lp:openelec

NOTE: i use uClibc instead glibc, so it is not possible to include binary graphic driver (nVidia/ ATI) and so it is not possible to get vdpau working. i am thinking of include eglibc for this, but this is not priority 1