I recently got a Raspberry Pi, which is an ARM based device which runs Linux. My goal is to use this as my HTPC running XBMC, so that I can move the fileserver out the lounge.

Edit: I've moved the latest information and updates about these packages to this page.

Building

I installed Raspbian on my RPi, which is basically a rebuild of Debian Wheezy specifically for the RPi (targeting the ARMv6 architecture with hard float). I found various instructions on how to build XBMC for Raspbian, but none of them were in the form of deb packages, and installing software without packages just makes me queezy. So I went off and built it myself.

Since the RPi is relatively low powered, I built the package on my laptop using qemu-user, which emulates binaries with a different architecture. I based the packaging on the XBMC package in Wheezy, and the source is from the xbmc-rbp branch on GitHub. I made the modifications to the source as per this forum post and added an initscript so that it can automatically start at bootup.

Installing

The easiest way to install the package is to add my archive to your system. To do this, store the following in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mene.list:

deb http://archive.mene.za.net/raspbian wheezy contrib

and then import the archive signing key:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key 5243CDED

You can then install it as you would with any other package, for example, with apt-get:

sudo apt-get install xbmc

(If you don't want to configure my archive you can download the packages manually, but you'll have to deal with all the dependencies. Note that it requires a newer libcec package which is also in my archive.)

The user which you're going to run XBMC as needs to be a member of the following groups:

audio video input dialout plugdev

Running

To run XBMC, run xbmc-standalone from a VT (i.e. not under X). XBMC accesses the display directly and not via Xorg.

If you want XBMC to automatically start when the system boots, edit /etc/default/xbmc and change ENABLED to 1:

ENABLED=1

You also need to set the user which XBMC should run as (the xbmc user is not automatically created at the moment). Run sudo service xbmc start to test this.

Configuration

The following settings in advancedsettings.xml decreases the CPU usage while showing the UI. Disabling the RSS feeds also helps with this.

<advancedsettings>
    <gui>
        <algorithmdirtyregions>3</algorithmdirtyregions>
        <nofliptimeout>0</nofliptimeout>
    </gui>
</advancedsettings>

Rebuilding

If you want to rebuild this package with a different source (e.g. a later Git revision), you need to prepare the source by running ./bootstrap before creating the orig.tar.gz. You obviously need all the build dependencies (which should be listed in the packaging), as well as the VideoCoreIV libraries in /opt. You probably want to set DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck parallel=4 to disable the tests (they failed to build for me), and speed up the build by using more than one core. You can find the packaging in my archive or my Bazaar repository.