Well; we’re finally getting a Home Theater PC (HTPC). I’ve been dreaming of this moment for about a year or so, but never really pursed it. I’m the kind of person that doesn’t intoxicate myself with things I cannot have. So; I just left it alone. The wife and I’ve been talking about it, though, ever since I introduced her to the Boxee Box, showcased at CES 2010.  The wife LOVES Boxee and she’s been playing with it on her desktop machine.

I’m starting to do my research and getting ready to emerge myself into the HTPC-underworld. Of course, I know nothing about this. I have some PC-building skills, but that’s only a hobby. I’m a big Linux geek and I plan to run Mythbuntu and Boxee on the intended machine. I’ll blog from time to time to share my resources, but I’m also looking for any advice.

To my surprise, after doing a Google search for “htpc” – the results were a bit disappointing. I immediately signed up for an account on HTPC Forum (without checking it out first). I realized after confirming my email address that this forum isn’t as active as I thought it was. Well that was a waste of time. With that lesson learned I’m looking for other resources.

Resources

• Tom’s Hardware, seems to have some good articles.

I almost blew my lid when I finally found this web site. I’ve been searching the Internets for anything with the keywords “boxee”, “rpm”, “fc12″, and “fedora 12″. My only result was an RPM for Fedora 10. The version of Boxee was x.7.x and the most recent version of Boxee is x.20.x. That wasn’t going to work – I HAVE to have the latest, I’m running Fedora for peace sake – how much more bleeding edge can I be!?

Well; luck would have it, I came across a forum thread where kurgan posted his latest Boxee/Fedora 12 build. The Great Guin smiles upon us all! So; I’m posting this blog entry to help spread the good word that a Fedora 12/Boxee RPM is out there!

Introducing Boxee Fedora 10/11/12 Port – Boxee Forum Thread

There is an Alpha and Beta version available. Please take the time to view the readme file. I figured you wouldn’t so I posted it below. As of 10 January 2010 this is what it reads.

A couple of notes about this port. The rpm will create necessary symlinks for the Boxee dev’s prebuilt binaries to work. I found them to be their rtorrent, flash player, flash libraries, and some of their xulrunner stuff. Without the symlinks, flash apps such as Hulu and Youtube will give you the “meatspin”. The symlinks created by this rpm are necessary because this package contains pre-bundled binaries built against libraries with a different naming convention than Fedora. Given this fact, a standard rpm -ivh will fail due to dependancy errors. Running the rpm install with the –nodeps is necessary at this time.

It is worth noting I do not run pulseaudio with Boxee or XBMC, so I recommend removing it since pulse cannot do SPDIF passthrough.

My initial testing on F10 has been positive, and I have found no problems thus far. I am able to play dvd .iso’s as well as dvd folders (play VIDEO_TS.IFO works for me), and flash based apps work. Unfortunately, Hulu content is not working with the Beta builds. At the moment, I cannot get any Hulu content to work with any Linux distro and the Firefox browser, so I do not think this is a Boxee specific issue.

Due to an rpmbuild error about an invalid rpath in one of the Boxee pre-built flash binaries/libraries for xulrunner, I have to use the following command when building:

QA_RPATHS=$[ 0x0002 ] rpmbuild -ba rpmbuild/SPECS/boxee.spec 2>&1 |tee box_rpm.log

Installing Boxee

Since it’s an RPM, you’d think it’ll be easy to install. Well of course it is stupid! Just joking. You can either double-click on the .rpm file or run the following command after you “cd” your way into the directory where you saved the .rpm file.

# yum localinstall --nogpgcheck boxee-0.9.20.10263-0.1.b.fc12.x86_64.rpm

Using YUM “localinstall” will install the package and any dependent packages needed. The code above was shared with me from a comment “bronson” made. I’ve been looking for this kind of command for quite some time. So; thanks bronson — you’ve enhanced my Linux experience by so much.

Running Boxee

The Boxee link is conveniently placed within your “Applications | Videos” menu. When you run it for the first time, don’t expect it to actually load completely. If it does crash, run the launch file in terminal to then see what the error is:

/usr/bin/run-boxee-desktop

For me, I was missing two libraries. I installed them and I was good to go!

# yum install faac glew-devel

I pretty much enjoyed the day and I was rewarded with our DSL package coming in the mail earlier that day – so we have Internet at our new house! Sweet!