More Boxee Goodness

After working with boxee on my openSUSE box, I decided in order to get a better feel for how boxee is supposed to work, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy", which is the officially supported version of Linux. I still find it an annoying distro. It never gets the boot partition right, even if you type the correct magic incantation in the mysterious box you are offered. I had to edit /boot/grub/menu.1st file to set the root partition manually to (hd1,3). I also dislike its authoritarian insistence on no root users, forcing you to use sudo to get anything done. Sometimes you just want to be the root user for a bit.

And never mind the fact I am not a big GNOME fan. Give me a solid KDE installation any time. I know I could have used the Kubuntu distro, but I wanted to stay mainstream with this installation. And I think YaST is a superior administration and package installation tool. Maybe slower (although much improved in openSUSE 11), but more flexible and cleaner. Just my opinion of course!

Anyway, I added the package source as mentioned in the download page for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and it just downloaded and worked. All the pieces worked, even Hulu and Comedy Central, which I couldn't get to work on my openSUSE box, where I would just get thing spinning rose and the back to the main menu.

After rebooting into openSUSE and mounting my Ubuntu partition, I tried out the Ubuntu boxee installation directly. I had to symbolically link a few .so files to match the openSUSE names with the Ubuntu names:

# cd /usr/lib
# ln -s libcurl.so.3 libcurl.so.3.0.0
# ln -s liblzo2.so liblzo.so.1
# ln -s libpcre.so.0.0.1 libpcre.so.3
# ln -s libbz2.so libbz2.so.1.0

I think those are ones I needed to do. You can find out for sure by using the ldd command:

$ ldd Boxee
linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
libhal-storage.so.1 => /usr/lib/libhal-storage.so.1 (0xb8029000)
<- many more dependencies removed ->
libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0xb620a000)

And knock me over with a feather if it didn't work correctly! After much narrowing down, I finally figured out the files in the boxee/system/players/flashplayer/ were different in the Ubuntu install versus the source tarball. These are, unfortunately, closed-source, so you have to deal with the binaries. Once I copied these over the ones in the source tarball, magically everything worked on my openSUSE box! For your source tarball pleasure, you can download the flashplayer files here. Just unzip this file in the flashplayer folder of your boxee install and you should be good to go!

Well, one more suggestion - Boxee, by default, looks in ~/Music, ~/Movies and ~/Pictures for media. If you don't already use those folders, create symbolic links for them to your storage area. You can also add Sources by hand via the boxee menu or just edit the ~/.boxee/UserData/profiles/{profilename}/sources.xml file. The ~/.boxee folder will be created after the first time you run boxee. Another thing to keep in mind is that the indexing of your media, like movies & music, is done in the background, is done at a very low priority, and there is no indication it is even being done. Just check the Recently Added section of the main menu to see how it is going, only don't' be surprised if it takes awhile for each one to show up. I've just been leaving it running overnight.

Next step for me is to figure out how to build an RPM package for it, so it will install in the right place and add a menu item. Then maybe even how to host a repository for updates.