So tonight I got a terrible idea. I figured that I’d try to install XBMC, the awesome media centre app for modded Xbox consoles. Turns out that they do, in fact, have a Linux version… but that none of it’s dependencies can be resolved automatically, and that every developer remotely related to the project was on crack while packing the tarball.
Because the devs only package a release for Ubuntu (that doesn’t work worth a shit on Debian), I was forced to download a tarball from this site, which I extracted to my home/username/bin directory. Unfortunately, when attempting to./configure in this directory, I discovered that the package had roughly 337 thousand dependencies, namely:
subversion make g++ gcc gawk pmount libtool nasm automake cmake gperf unzip bison libsdl-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev libsdl-stretch-dev libfribidi-dev liblzo-dev libfreetype6-dev libsqlite3-dev libogg-dev libasound-dev python-sqlite libglew-dev libcurl4-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libmad0-dev libogg-dev libvorbis-dev libmysqlclient-dev libpcre3-dev libdbus-1-dev libhal-dev libhal-storage-dev libjasper-dev libfontconfig-dev libbz2-dev libboost-dev libfaac-dev libenca-dev libxt-dev libxmu-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libpulse-dev mesa-utils libcdio-dev
Yeah. That many. Further, the library liblzo-dev is no longer a part of Debian Lenny, although it is available from the Etch repositories. You can grab that tarball and manually install it from this page. Oh, and you’ll also need to add the debian-multimedia non-free repositories to your sources.list file in order to obtain libdvdcss… You can find instructions to do that here.
Assuming you’re still with me, and have managed to install all of the above dependencies (all 300+ MB of them), you’ll probably still fail, because the tarballs for the vast majority of them fail to set execute permissions on their configure files on extraction. As such, you’ll have to manually walk through each of the folders under xbmc and add those permissions…
After adding these permissions as deep as I could in the directory structure with the command chmod -R +x */configure (where you can add up to 6 instances of */), and running the XBMC config file a solid 50+ times, I’m stuck on the libdvdnav library, which doesn’t seem to contain a valid config file… Seeing as I have to work tomorrow, I offically give up for now. Christ this must be a small taste of what Gentoo is like all the time.
The Next Morning:
With a clear head and a fresh cup of coffee, I took another shot at installing XBMC.After spending 20 minutes manually installing the libdvdnav, libdvdread, and libdvdcss libraries, I finally managed to run the XBMC configure script with no errors.
After just over a half hour compiling, I finally got XBMC installed and gave it a test run.
Initially, I had troubles connecting to any network shares where my media is stored. After going into the network settings, changing my workgroup name, and telling the app to automatically mount SMB shares, everything seemed peachy.
More to come as I figure this out
Seems like more work than it’s worth.
For what it’s worth there is a xbmc package now.
# Multimedia
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org sid main” > /etc/apt/sources.list
xbmc has now moved into a git repository.
I cloned the repository, and was able to build a local copy.
Thing that holds me back from that approach is I would like to build a debian package, rather than just install to /usr/local/
I’ve just compiled xbmc on lenny today. And it was smooth like a butter. You sure you had your distro up-to-date?
Yeah that’s pretty pedestrian compared with the things that can go wrong with Gentoo. 😉
Even if I was able to verbalise (without crying) the insane dependency tangles an out of date Gentoo box can produce you wouldn’t believe me… I run Debian now… life is good.
Stonie.