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However, when my old standard-definition TV was dying, I wanted to upgrade to a new, shiny LCD TV, and so I did. Back then, it didn’t matter as much, as HD content really wasn’t that popular yet, and the display of SD content on the TV was rather acceptable.

Now, some years later, I recently had a small batch of money, and therefore decided to retire the, now old, LG 32″ TV, and get a brand-sparkling-new 47″ LED version instead. Now doing that was one thing, but I really wanted to upgrade my mediacenter as well. My initial thought, being the Apple-fanboy that I am, was to get a Mac Mini, and hack that like a madman. However, I knew that the advancements within “nettops” (Small desktop computers based on the lowpower netbook cpu’s) meant that you could get a similar sized PC at half the price of the Mini (And using less power too, something quite important in these global warming times ;) ).

Anyway, these were the primary requirements for my new system:

Should be able to handle most formats
Should be able to handle full-HD playback
Should be able to stream from the NAS in the home office without lag
Should be easy to manage

So, I ended up getting a AsRock ION 330HT , a model very popular among XBMC fans. It’s small, uses the Nvidia ION platform (capable of running full-HD without straining the CPU), has HDMI out, has eSATA, 6 USB ports and even a VGA port if you’re using an old screen for the initial setup. Oh, and it has built-in IR-receiver and a remote to go along with it, so you don’t need an external (read: Ugly) receiver!

There’s a lot of different setups outthere, and other producers are becoming as popular as the AsRock. Shuttle has new models coming out at the moment, Acer etc. are also in the race for the living room with smaller, more friendly devices (No more large PC enclosures in the living room, along with fan noise, woohoo!), so better alternatives might already be available. I just suggest having a look at the XBMC Forum before buying anything.

The initial setup

This took me some trial and error, but it will be worth it in the end, as the final system works excellently. Don’t expect everything to work after 5 mins. though, so if you have no patience, or dislike reading and/or troubleshooting, doing this setup may not be for you.

Anyway: First up, get a minimal version of Ubuntu 32 or 64 bit. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD should provide you with download links. You’d want Karmic Koala, as that’s suggested as the most stable atm, when running XBMC. To not have to use a CD for the minimal install (It’s only 12MB), I use UNetbootin to create a bootable USB drive.

Now boot the machine from the USB key, and run through the Ubuntu install. You’d probably want to partition your main drive with one of the default setups, that create 3 partitions (root, home and swap). This is an advantage, as it allows you to store all your media within /home and not have it deleted if/when you reinstall your HTPC.
Furthermore, when the installer asks you to select packages to install, you’d want to select the “Basic Ubuntu Server” and “OpenSSH Server”, to install only the basics, and allow for SSH access to the machine later on (Makes maintenance somewhat easier when the machine is finally located below your TV).
Finally, create a user named “xbmc”. This user will run the actual software, own all the mediafiles etc.

Installing the basics

Assuming you’ve finished the Ubuntu setup, log on as root (using the password you setup in the initial install), and do the following:

[shell]visudo[/shell]

Now after the line containing “root”, add the following:

[shell]xbmc ALL=(ALL) ALL[/shell]

This allows the xbmc user to use the sudo command for all commands. Now logout of the root account, and log in as xbmc. Here’s the fun part: A couple of XBMC users has decided to gather all of the guides, howtos etc. in one simple installer, that simply allows you to run their installer instead of having to install XBMC, graphic drivers etc. manually.

I use this to setup my AsRock box, as it’s able to fix graphic drivers and HD acceleration, setup my remote, setup audio over HDMI, setup XBMC and make everything boot up when starting the machine, without having to manually change anything. Simply put, when the basic system is installed and this script is run, XBMC should just be ready to take on everything you throw at it.

Anyway, to run the installer, type the following as the xbmc user:

[shell]wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/xci/files/Release/xci.sh/download
chmod +x xci.sh; sudo ./xci.sh[/shell]

And follow the onscreen instructions, to install XBMC stable and whatever you may need. Now you should be done! To get mediafiles onto your new mediacenter, try SFTP’ing a couple of files over to test. In the longer run you may want to setup Samba shares or setup NFS on the machine, to make it easier, but that’s a story for another day ;)

Why would I run everything locally ?

Over the last years, a lot of the development agencies in the PHP world, has found out the joys of having local, individual environments for all developers, and managing larger projects through version control like SVN, CVS or, my new favourite, Git. Most people don’t have the luxury of having their own dedicated testserver for development, but you really don’t need one either. If you just have a Mac with OS X, you’ll have everything you need.

The reasons for having a local environment are quite massive: You’re able to have a complete replica of a running website, you’ll be able to develop new features without risking the stability of your public site. You’ll have full control of every setting in Apache, MySQL and PHP, meaning you’ll have the opportunity of testing optimizations and database structures properly, without the risk of destroying everything in a production environment.

Prerequirements

To complete the setup of Apache & friends, you’ll need the assistance of Terminal. If you are not comfortable with Terminal, just feel free to copy’n'paste every command here. Of course, as time passes, and you’re using your new environment, you’ll probably notice the advantages of Terminal anyway.

Setting up Apache

As Apache 2 is bundled with Leopard, this is very easy. Apache is controlled by enabling Web sharing in System Preferences.

Setting up webroots

As you have full control of Apache’s setup, you could actually put your websites whereever you’d like. However, as you already have the Sites folder available in your home directory, I’ll just make use of that. This also ensures, that Time Machine for instance is able to create backups of your sites.

So go ahead and create a directory within Sites for your new site, and try to give it a memorable name (In this example I’ll use jesperrasmussen.com from now on) .

[shell]sudo mkdir -p ~/Sites/jesperrasmussen.com/htdocs[/shell]

While you’re at it, add a general directory for Apache’s logs within Sites, to gather all sites logs within one place, making debugging and log-analyzing a bit easier.

[shell]sudo mkdir ~/Sites/logs[/shell]

Now that that’s done, you should have a couple of nice directories for the virtualhost and its logfiles, so let’s move on.

Setting up a VirtualHost

In the default setting, Apache will see your Sites folder as one site, as it’s setup to allow one personal site per user. To make Apache recognize the new virtual hosts, you need to edit the file /private/etc/apache2/users/.conf in your favourite editor (I recommend emacs or nano for Terminal editing).

The file will look somewhat like this when you open it:

[shell]<Directory "/Users/jesper/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>[/shell]

Now, what we’ll do, is that we’ll add the lines for a new virtualhost in the configuration. Furthermore, in my example, there’s an added .dev alias to the domain, allowing me to access the local development version of the site by accessing jesperrasmussen.dev, and access the public version (On another server) by accessing jesperrasmussen.com. Anyway, add the following lines, replacing jesperrasmussen.com with whatever your virtual host is called, and save the file.

[shell]NameVirtualHost *:80
DocumentRoot /Users/jesper/Sites/jesperrasmussen.com/htdocs
ServerName jesperrasmussen.com
ServerAlias jesperrasmussen.dev
ErrorLog /Users/jesper/Sites/logs/jesperrasmussen.com-error_log
CustomLog /Users/jesper/Sites/logs/jesperrasmussen.com-access_log common[/shell]

Restarting Apache

Inorder to test the new site, we need to reload Apache’s configuration files. This is done by testing the new config files first.

[shell]sudo apachectl -t[/shell]

If this says “Syntax OK”, we should gracefully load the changes into Apache. *)

[shell]sudo apachectl graceful[/shell]

Accessing your newly created site

Now, you may think you should be able to access your new site at the domain you’ve entered. But no, you still need one more thing, changing your hosts-file into handling your domain locally (Or at least, the development version). This is done by editing /etc/hosts (Again, using emacs or nano), like so:

[shell]sudo nano /etc/hosts[/shell]

This should load your hosts-file **), which should look like this:

[shell]127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost[/shell]

Now, in the bottom of the file, insert a couple of blank lines to seperate your changes from the default parts, and insert this line:

[shell]127.0.0.1 jesperrasmussen.dev www.jesperrasmussen.dev[/shell]

This will force your machine into believing that your domain is located at localhost, thus making the request at your local Apache.

Now, everything should work, try putting a dummy index.html file in your new htdocs directory, and try loading the site in your browser. Next time I’ll have a look at enabling PHP and MySQL support on your standard machine.

Further reading

It’s come to my attention that Patrick Gibson has a fine shellscript for handling the VirtualHost part, making this a lot easier.
You might want to check that out

* Gracefully restarting Apache lets Apache apply the configuration more smoothly, by allowing it’s child processes to keep running with the old configuration, but loading the new configuration for all new processes. This is usually done in production environments, to avoid hard restarting servers, thereby avoiding possible downtime.

** The hosts-file is OS X’s way of overriding DNS locally. It allows you to force a domain to a specific IP-address rather than the one specified in the domains DNS. This is especially useful for testing a development or staging environment with the correct domainname.