Another busy weekend – shopping, mowing the lawn, visiting friends and troubleshooting system issues, but I managed to set up my first home media center.
The combination of Ubuntu, XBMC and Rii wireless keyboard is so perfect. It offers me a quick, resourceful and remote control enabled home media center solution. My wife even loves it more than me, a thing that does not usually happen 🙂 She generally thinks baking is more fun than playing with those technologies.
Here my some notes:
1) If you use an old laptop and want to only display on the TV. You need to find out the name of the laptop screen by running ‘xrandr’, e.g it is named eDP1. Then add GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”<default paramaters> video=eDP1:d” to /etc/default/grub, update the grub ‘update-grub‘ or add ‘xrandr –output eDP1 –off‘ to the login script.
2) For some languages that do not display correctly in XBMC, you have to choose the right font for them. e.g You need to use font Arial for showing Chinese.
3) If you are lucky, you may be able to get your TV remote control work on your XBMC. The signals are transferred via the HDMI cable. The settings can be found in System -> Settings -> System -> Input Devices -> Peripherals
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