[UPDATE] XMBC is now available as binary package for Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-intrepid/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-intrepid/ubuntu intrepid main


Perform an ‘apt-get update‘ before you install it via ‘apt-get install xbmc‘. If you intend to install XBMC manually (e.g. for development supporting reasons), go ahead reading.

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As active member of the MyMediaSystem project I’m quite interested in other Open Source Media Center applications, like Elisa, MythTV, GeekBox or XBMC.
The XBMC project is quite respectable and famous one, so I think it’s really worth to look at it. I’ve tried MythTV and Elisa, but wasn’t much satisfied with them. But that’s gonna be another story.

I didn’t spent much time in searching for a HOWTO install this on my system. First of all I’ve looked into the Ubuntu repo of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) with ‘aptitude search xmbc‘, but didn’t find anything. (Elisa can be already installed via ‘aptitude install elisa‘.) So I was looking for the repository sources and found this page, where a rudimentary installation HOWTO can be found.
I’ve downloaded the repo

cd /usr/local/src
svn checkout https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/branches/linuxport/XBMC
cd XBMC

and it took ages! (about 30mins or some).

Unfortunately the ./configure part gave me a bunch of missing packages, and I had to install every single one of it first:

aptitude install libgwenhywfar-dev libgwenhywfar47-dev libglew-dev libmad0-dev
aptitude install libtre-dev libsdl-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libbz2-dev libfribidi-dev
aptitude install liblzo2-dev libmysqlclient-dev libjasper-dev libenca-dev libxmu-dev libcurl4-dev
aptitude install libhal-dev libhal-storage-dev cmake gperf

This took a while. If a package should be unnecessary, pls let me know. And as I mentioned already, I’m a member of the MMS project, so I have already a few packages install, that’s way I guess you’re going to need some of the below mentioned packages, too:

aptitude install libimlib2-dev libsdl1.2-dev autoconf build-essential libalsaplayer-dev mplayer-nogui libxss-dev
aptitude install libtag1-dev libncurses5-dev libpcre3-dev liblircclient-dev libtool gettext
aptitude install libsqlite3-dev libgtk2.0-dev libcommoncpp2-dev inotify-tools libinotifytools0-dev
aptitude install libboost-dev libxine-dev
aptitude install alsaplayer alsaplayer-daemon xine-ui python2.4-dev

Now run configure:

./configure

This took also quite a while. If you find anything worth mentioning it, tell me and I’ll update these lines.

Finally configure gave me this:

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XBMC Configuration:
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Debugging: Yes
Profiling: No
OpenGL: Yes
Joystick: Yes
XRandR: Yes
PCRE Support: Yes
ccache: No
prefix: /usr/local
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