I’ve replaced the Fedora14 on my Revo 3610 with Ubuntu 12.04 now its a dedicated HTPC and not “the visitor box”.

I found out pretty much straight away that Unity2D uses too much background resources for XBMC to run alongside, so I’m making use of the XBMC session, which doesn’t load a window manager underneath and can stream 1080p over PowerLineHD to the NFS server just fine.

I compiled XBMC 12 alpha (Froyo) from git but found that the database schema has changed so much that XWMM 2.0.6 doesn’t work with it. So I went back to the Ubuntu-packaged 11.0 (Eden).

Anyway, here’s the instructions I used (kind of based on these) it takes about 50mins to compile on the Revo, not much slower than in a VM:

make distclean
git reset --hard
git clean -xfd
git pull

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-vdpau --disable-pulse --disable-crystalhd \
  --disable-debug --disable-avahi --disable-airplay --disable-airtunes \
  --disable-afpclient

make -C lib/addons/script.module.pil
make -j4
sudo make install prefix=/usr

I received my Anyware HA-IR01SV MCE remote control, installed lirc (configured as MCE remote) and it worked straight away, its so much better than using a keyboard.

I changed the default shutdown type to “suspend” in the XBMC settings, and now the remote control power button suspends the PC. To get it to wake the PC up again though, I had to figure out the device ID:

# lsusb
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 1784:0011 TopSeed Technology Corp. 

# dmesg | grep mceusb
[13347.492286] mceusb 2-4:1.0: Registered Topseed Technology Corp. eHome Infrared Transceiver with mce emulator interface version 2

Then added this line to /etc/rc.local:

echo enabled > /sys/bus/usb/devices/2-4/power/wakeup

Update: a few other things to optimise Ubuntu 12.04:

  1. Disable Avahi by changing AVAHI_DAEMON_DETECT_LOCAL=1 in /etc/default/avahi-daemon to 0

  2. Disable IPv6 by adding this to /etc/sysctl.conf

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

  1. Install Unsettings and a few other tweaks to make Unity more usable: howto

  2. Unmute HDMI audio by running alsamixer as root and pressing “M” on any muted SPDIF channels.