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.

Create Customized Linux Distro

I own a HP Mini210 with Intel Pineview processor and all of the latest and greatest Linux distro sucks on this one. And those Win guys who may be reading this, don't ever mention to me on trying Win 7 on this one, though it came with home basic by default, that goes against my morals to have such a thing like Windows on my machine less even talk about it.

So here I am on creating my own distribution customized to my taste and perfect the way I want it.

Few questions I asked my self about what I want to do once I am done with this distribution and thats what I concluded -

1. Boot as fast as it can
2. Able to browse internet
3. Download my mails
4. Watch on-line/local stored movies. HD content possible ?

So the above needed only simple packages, but I wanted something more - An easy to use package management system and I zeroed on Debian tool "aptitude" and my base distro as Debian. So lets jump into creating it right away.

What you need to achieve this

• Any Linux desktop environment - Fedora/Ubuntu/Mint/Suse/Mandrake, etc
• I see pain on Windows guys :) So install
• VirtualBox
• And then install any of the above mentioned flavors of Linux distros inside that
• Do install debootstrap, make, gcc

Creating the base root file system -  
Now you can directly install this on a physical hard disk as well, but I will give steps based on virtual disks so that we can burn them as Live CD, you know the cool stuff to boot from USB pen-drive any-time, anywhere and yes persistent.
Create a virtual disk -

dd if=/dev/zero of=rootfs.ext4 bs=1024 count=524288

Yeah 512MB is more than sufficient. We can resize it later. Keeping it small helps in actually while burning on USB pen drive. Actually the base console install needs just 256MB. Blown Away Eh :)

Prepare the disk image file with ext4 file system and mount it. Next create the basic root fs.

# mkfs.ext4 rootfs.ext4
# mkdir rootfs
# mount -o loop rootfs.ext4 rootfs
# debootstrap --arch ia64 squeeze rootfs http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian

You have the rootfs ready and now time to use another cool thing - chroot

# mount -t proc proc rootfs/proc

# mount -t sysfs sys rootfs/sys

# mount --bind /dev rootfs/dev

# chroot rootfs /bin/bash

You are now in your root file system and any modification you do are restricted to your new debian root fs. Do configure the networking stuff, like modifying the /etc/hosts, /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hostname, etc

Also remember to add a new user for your self using useradd and also change the root password using passwd command. In Fedora selinux might crip, so disable that. Now our rootfs is ready. Just unmount everything

# exit

# umount rootfs/proc

# umount rootfs/sys

# umount rootfs/dev

# umount rootfs

 Building the Kernel
I wanted to use the latest Linux kernel out there and grabbed the tarball from www.kernel.org for latest stable 3.4.4 kernel

Apply the default kernel configuration x86_64_defconfig
Now here comes the difficult and iterative task of fine tuning your kernel to support your device and only your device :) I removed all the unnecessary drivers. Just selected exact drivers matching my hardware for the HP Mini 210. Sometimes things didn't work and you relise you have removed wrong driver and need to rebring it in. Now as I wanted to make it boot fast. Most of the drivers for the netbook I just made as kernel modules to have a very small kernel. Actually basic kernel booted in less than 3 seconds.

Putting things together with a boot-loader (Grub)
Insert you pen drive and make two partitions using fdisk. Note the device name carefully - sdb or sdc, etc

1. boot partition - 64 MB is more than sufficient. Format as vfat(mkfs.vfat)
2. rootfs partition - 8 GB for now. You can resize it later
3. Make additional partitions as you wish. Basically the current system to be usable you may need nothing more than 1.5 GB
   

Mount the vfat partition say as /media/boot. Install the grub as follows -

grub2-install --force --no-floppy --root-directory=/media/boot /dev/sdb1

Copy the default grub.cfg from your host linux system /boot/grub2/grub.cfg /mnt/boot/boot/grub2/grub.cfg. Remove all the enteries and just add a new entry for our latest kernel as follows -

menuentry 'TUX Kernel (3.4.4)' --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
        load_video
        set gfxpayload=keep
        insmod gzio
        insmod part_msdos
        insmod ext2
        set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
        echo 'Loading Tux Kernel (3.4.4)'
        linux   /bzImage root=/dev/sdb2

}

Burn the rootfs, resize it to 8GB and label it

# dd if=rootfs.ext4 of=/dev/sdb2

# e2fsck /dev/sdb2

# resize2fs /dev/sdb2

# e2label /dev/sdb2 rootfs

Copy the kernel image to the /boot partition

# cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage /media/boot

 We are ready. just boot from the pen drive and you have console environment booted in under 8s. Install the X environment as  follows -

# apt-get update

# apt-get install xfce4

 Now we have a bare minimum Linux system (Under 1 GB). We can fine tune what packages we want like firefox(browser), thunderbird (e-mail client), vlc(media player) etc avoiding all the clutter that all of the latest distros install by default. I got my desired system in less than 1.5Gb booting in around 10s.