HOWTO's

Today I decided to upgrade all my boxes at home to Maverick Meercat. First I started with my Netbook, then followed my NAS and now the XBMC box (Acer Revo 3600). As a base point, you’ll need a minimal installation of Maverick Meercat (simply put the mini.iso onto an usb pen drive and boot from it), which luckily is rather easy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 # First we'll need these tools on the box where we're preparing the stick sudo aptitude install syslinux mbr mtools # Create a FAT16 partition on your USB stick sudo fdisk /dev/sdb # Format the partition as VFAT sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1 # Need to install the bootloader (syslinux) before doing anything else! sudo syslinux /dev/sdb1 # Now mount the mini.iso file as loop, copy the content to the usb stick sudo mkdir /media/usb; sudo mkdir /media/cdrom0 sudo mount -o loop ~/mini.iso /media/cdrom0; sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb sudo cp -r /media/cdrom0/* /media/usb # Rename the isolinux.cfg sudo mv /media/usb/isolinux.cfg /media/usb/syslinux.cfg sudo umount /media/usb /media/cdrom0 # Create a MBR on the usb stick sudo install-mbr /dev/sdb After that is done, boot your box with the USB stick. Make the minimal command line installation. After that finishes, switch to the adjacent console (i.e. tty2) hit ENTER, and install a few packages that we need for after the reboot: ...

Yesterday out of a sudden, the sound on my Acer Revo stopped working. Don’t ask me why, I didn’t update anything in between New Years eve and today. Just no sound. Tried removing my .asoundrc, tried rebooting, tried powering off; but nothing worked. Since the Revo was running Jaunty Jackalope, I decided to reinstall the box (yeah, yet again) – but this time with Karmic Koala. Took this forums post and this blog entry as pointer (ie what needed to be installed), and started from there. And guess what … after finishing all that, changing the settings in XBMC – tada sound works. After finishing, I turned the box off and then back on, booted to the “old” installation – guess what .. Sound is working again. I really don’t have a single clue as to why the heck the sound stopped working and the started working without any doing, but I’m glad :-P ...