Thumbs Up to XBMC

Now few days back I just booted my custom distro on my Pineview based HP Mini 210 netbook. There had always been an idea to use it as my media center as well and I was planning now to customize my distro for the use case. I could have just installed relevant stuff and make my own distro for the same, but then I thought let me check XBMC.

And boy, was I amazed ? I was just floored. A perfect distro with minimal stuff and with a basic ubuntu environment as well....

So here is what I did. Grabbed the XBMCbuntu ISO image and then used Unetbootin to burn the ISO image to my pen drive. You would need at-least 2 GB of pen drive to do this. You can also install Unetbootin as follows -

$ sudo apt-get install unetbootin

Boot the Live Pen-Drive and you will be inside the  XBMC's amazing and fast User Interface.

On top of that, you have a means to login into a normal desktop environment where you can configure few things like WiFi passwords, etc. What more you can easily install more packages to suit you. 

Now next thing was how to control this shiny new media center using a remote. I was not surprised that a perfect remote control application is already available in Android market. The XMBC has an inbuilt webserver and you can connect to it using the WiFi on your phone and control the Media Playback. Amazing.

So I have this Samsung Galaxy S2 and I installed the official XMBC remote control application which worked like a charm. Setting the remote is pretty intuitive and you will be up and running in a couple of minutes. The offcial website is http://code.google.com/p/android-xbmcremote/

Here is how it looks from the project website

Wow, this saved a lot of effort for me. Watch out now for article on how I enable it on my Panda-Board soon.