this is obsolete doc -- see http://doc.nethence.com/ instead

Turning a RHEL6 or CentOS6 system into a media center with XBMC 

 

Requirements 

Make sure X is configured, 

yum groupinstall "x window system"
X -configure

Note. Eventually install the relevant drivers for your card e.g. for AMD/ATI (http://support.amd.com/fr/Pages/AMDSupportHub.aspx). 

 

Eventually enable FTP on the box to send the drivers a bit more faster than it would upload through SSH/SFTP, 

rpm -q vsftpd
cd /etc/vsftpd/
vi user_list
(uncomment root)
vi ftpusers
(same there)
service vsftpd restart
chkconfig vsftpd on

once the drivers are uploaded you may disable it (or remove the root authorization), 

chkconfig vsftpd off
service vsftpd stop

 

Installation 

Use the EPEL and Fusion RPM repos to install pre-packaged XBMC binaries ! 

cd ~/
wget http://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
wget http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/el/updates/6/i386/rpmfusion-free-release-6-1.noarch.rpm
wget http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/updates/6/i386/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-6-1.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh *.rpm
yum search xbmc
yum -y install xbmc

 

Configuration 

Enable XBMC at boot time, 

useradd -g users -G video,audio xbmc
passwd xbmc
cd /etc/
cp inittab inittab.dist
vi inittab

change, 

id:5:initdefault:

and, 

cd /etc/init/
cat > xbmc.conf <<EOF9
exec login -f xbmc </dev/tty7 &>/dev/tty7
EOF9

 

Then configure the user environment parameters, 

su - xbmc
pwd
cat > .xinitrc <<EOF9
exec ck-launch-session xbmc
EOF9
cat .xinitrc
cat >> .bash_profile <<EOF9
[[ \$(tty) = "/dev/tty7" ]] && exec startx </dev/null &>/dev/null
EOF9
touch .hushlogin
^D

 

Back to root, enable dbus (yep, that's messagebus on RHEL), 

service messagebus restart
chkconfig messagebus on

 

References 

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Installing_XBMC_for_Linux#Fedora_and_CentOS