Occidentalis and xbmc possible?

[cyborg5]

One of the things I hoped to be able to do with my raspberry is to use it as a media server using xbmc which I had heard you could do. Unfortunately I didn't read any of the how-to's. As best I can tell they all start out with "install this customized version of Linux". On the other hand I don't want to give up Occidentalis. Has anybody tried to do this? Sounds to me like it's not exactly a newbie project

[volkerb]

I've tried this. I followed the instructions for building XMBC into a raspbian OS described here: http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianXBMC except using occidentalis. The make fails. Not exactly sure why, everything up to that point goes smoothly. Maybe someone with more expertise than myself would know just with a quick glance at the commands described. It takes a long time to get the pi to that point 8 hours plus for me. Which is a real bummer as I'd like to have my pi doing three things, xbmc, functioning as a thermostat for my deepfreeze using adafruits wonderful breakout, a handy dandy relay, and the ds18b20 temp sensor (also from here with nice walkthrough), and something to hardware tinker with other DIY projects (audio recording through ads1115? or who knows what). Looks like i can get the temp sensor up with newer raspbian builds but i was really wanting occidentalis for hardware support for who knows what i try next... sigh...

[adafruit_support_mike]

Actually, "the make fails" are some of the most dreaded words in the world of software. They mean that somewhere in the system one piece expects to find another piece, but doesn't.

A quick look at the XMBC instructions doesn't say anything terribly helpful, aside from a truly frightening list of config options and file munging. A quick look at the recommended OS version Pisces didn't give much information either, except that it's a "more complete" installation of Debian.

Usually a make will fail with a list of errors explaining the immediate issue that caused the problem. Do you happen to remember what those were?

FWIW, if you haven't deleted the code, you should be able to reproduce the failure pretty quickly. One of the key features in 'make' is its ability to decide which files need to be recompiled and which don't. It creates a list of all the things needed to build each piece (called a 'topologically sorted list') and then checks to see how old the files are. If the build product is newer than any file in its dependency chain, 'make' assumes that piece of the build is still good. If one of the dependencies is newer than something that needs it, 'make' assumes that sequence of parts needs to be rebuilt.

So.. if the files are still there and you haven't edited, moved, or 'touch'ed anything (a command that changes the file's last-changed date to "now"), typing `make` should skip straight to the faliure without crunching along for eight hours first.