this is obsolete doc -- see http://doc.nethence.com/ instead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