XBMC on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Ocelot

Yesterday I upgraded my XBMC media centre, an Acer (bleugh!) Revo 3610 from Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.10 (Oneric Ocelot).

The upgrade itself went fine but (re)installed a few things I’d previously removed, things I didn’t want and things which break a few XBMC features. This is what I had to do to reset things:

  1. Reset the xbmc user’s login session to ‘custom session’ using the gear icon on the top-right of the login window
  2. Add a .xsession file containing 
    #!/bin/sh
exec xbmc

    and chmod +x .xsession

  3. apt-get remove nautilus ubufox xul-ext-ubufox network-manager* pulseaudio
  4. Reset network settings (e.g. /etc/resolv.conf) if you made the mistake of logging in, resulting in NetworkManager resetting everything
  5. Check your xbmc user is still in the ‘audio’ group
  6. apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
  7. apt-get update
  8. apt-get install nvidia-current # if you hadn’t previously done this
  9. apt-get dist-upgrade
  10. apt-get autoremove

It’s probably worth saying I use plain stereo output from the headphone jack, and a Grand Hand III VGA adapter rather than HDMI because my TV is about 9 years old.