SlaXBMC 14.2 is released

YES IT IS TRUE! The wait is officially over....and without further ado let me introduce you our latest creation

SlaXBMC 14.2

Yeap you've read it right. With the dawn of a sparkling new Slackware release and the evolution of our favorite multimedia application (XBMC) into the refined open source Home Theater software named KODI we are back with another SlaXBMC release powered by Slackware 14.2 and KODI 16.1 'Jarvis'.

SlaXBMC 14.2 comes in three flavors and a Raspberry Pi twist }:)
  • x86 or otherwise known as 32bit, using Linux kernel 4.4.19
  • x86_64 or otherwise known as 64bit, using Linux kernel 4.4.19
  • ARM supporting the Raspberry Pi 1 (A, A+, B, B+) hardware, using Linux kernel 4.4.21
  • ARM supporting the Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 hardware, using Linux kernel 4.4.21
As per the SlaXBMC tradition the installer allows the generation of two (out of the box) setup profiles (Minimal, Developer) where both upon completion provide a machine booting directly into KODI Jarvis and still maintain the capability to get back into the Desktop when exiting KODI. The footprint of the SlaXBMC Linux filesystem for each profile is as follows:
  • x86 - Developer < 4.2 GB
  • x86 - Minimal < 2.8 GB
  • x86_64 - Developer < 4.2 GB
  • x86_64 - Minimal < 2.8 GB
  • ARM RPi1 - Developer < 3.5 GB
  • ARM RPi1 - Minimal < 2.2 GB
  • ARM RPi23 - Developer < 3.5 GB
  • ARM RPi23 - Minimal < 2.2 GB
NOTE: Further improvement on the Minimal profile disk space is possible for those wishing to experiment a little more };) 
All x86* flavors and profiles contain the latest SlackwareSlackwareARM software suite and come Firefox and NetSurf browser ready while the ARM* flavors contain only NetSurf and the usual overclock settings menu!

Last but not least the ISO images of the x86* flavor, pre-built ARM Raspberry Pi 1,2/3 images of both profiles and sources are available on our official SlaXBMC home (http://www.slackware.org.uk/slaxbmc/) and below.

Distribution ArchitectureDownloadMD5
SlaXBMC (x86)slaxbmc-14.2-install.iso94f359c91ecb6e0079a13e5b82374309
SlaXBMC64 (x86_64)slaxbmc64-14.2-install.iso5ebfb6df721f3d7e037553ec633aff58
SlaXBMCRPi1 (Minimal)slaxbmcrpi1-14.2-minimal.img.xz8e1da91ce38aa350bd4325d3953f3881
SlaXBMCRPi1 (Developer)slaxbmcrpi1-14.2-developer.img.xz999b645133d80222a1e04353490abc11
SlaXBMCRPi23 (Minimal)slaxbmcrpi23-14.2-minimal.img.xza0a6732a6af876ec176caa53f0aa873b
SlaXBMCRPi23 (Developer)slaxbmcrpi23-14.2-developer.img.xzabf63856e3b1e449fa1b7264fb922517

Enjoy,
Analekto


P.S: This will be the last release of SlaXBMC supporting the Raspberry Pi 1 hardware due to the father OS (Slackware ARM) moving to a hard-float built supporting minimum armv7 targets (i.e Raspberry Pi 2 and above)

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the work! I installed slaxbmc on a raspberry pi 2 that has the official 7" touchscreen. When kodi/xbmc starts it only shows the lower left corner of the kodi GUI the rest is cut off. Do you know how to work around this problem?

Analekto said...

Hi,

I'm afraid I don't have a touchscreen to check this out but if I were you I would try enabling and adjusting the overscan_left, overscan_right, overscan_top and overscan_bottom parameters in the boot sector config.txt file until the screen is centered. You could edit that at the desktop through the right click "System Tools -> Overclock Settings -> Manual" menu

Btw, I found a bug where the gui settings are not saved on exit (at least on my x86_64 ION), I will be posting a generic patch asap.

Thanks again for the feedback and please let me know if you finally manage to get the touchscreen working.

Analekto

Geremia said...

Is there going to be a hard-float build of SlaXBMCRPi23?

Analekto said...

Hi Geremia,

Yes, that is the plan for future SlaXBMCRPI23 releases; and since SlaXBMCRPi1 will be deprecated there will be only one SlaXBMCRPi release, that for RPi2/3 in hard-float.

Analekto

Geremia said...

I was able to build Kodi Kryption (17.0) using the SARPi distro. See this for CMake build options.

Analekto said...

Nice one Geremia, I'll definitely keep that in mind...

Analekto

Maarten Hendrickx said...

To disable overscan I edited boot/config.txt and added disable_overscan=1.
I use slaxbmc on spi3. I had to edit the sd-card on my laptop as I did not find out how to edit the boot partition, is it hidden?
I use nano and lxterminal. For nano, there is a package, for lxterminal I used a slackbuild from PhantomX after adding vte with slackpkg install vte.
I have another question. How can I update the kernel, rpi-update (instructions from sarpi) did not do it? How do I add LXDE?

Unknown said...

Hi
where is autostart file to edit and run browser witch www site ?

Analekto said...

Hi Pawel,

That would-be the "/root/.fluxbox/startup" file. Just add your command line somewhere before the "exec fluxbox" line and make sure you append & at the end of your command line...

Analekto

Analekto said...

Hi Maarten,

The boot partition on the SDCARD is indeed hidden from the system. You could access it by mounting it manually in command line like: mount -t auto /dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot
The contents of the partition will then be available to you under folder /boot. When done make sure you remove the lock on the partition using: umount /boot

A much simpler way to edit the config.txt is available on the Desktop using the right mouse click menu->System Tools->Overclock Settings selection. The bottom option on the list allows manual editing the config.txt ;)

SlaXBMCRPi does not use the rpi-update method like other distributions. You will have to get your hands dirty and create a new kernel for your system; once you succeed the world is your oyster ;).
The source code to do this is available on http://slackware.uk/slaxbmc/14.2/slaxbmcsrc-14.2/sourcerpi/k/kernel-raspi/. I would recommend reading the kernel-raspi.SlackBuild file first (that's what you invoke to start the build process) and try to understand what's going on in there. Once you're happy with that check the changes applied to the vanilla config-4.X-rpi23 file using the diff version. The diff contains the changes required to make the kernel bootable in the context of SlaXBMCRpi.

Analekto