Operating System

Geexbox Media Center 2.0 Released – Linux Home Theatre PC Distro

S Ranjith        

The live Linux distro for media center PCs, Home Theatre PCs(HTPC), Media TVs released its version 2.0.According to developer Benjamin Zores, the team had been “struggling for months and years to design this v2.0 version, switching from one Media Center project to another”, and even creating its own before the group decided “to finally stick with the most powerful one, the reference: XBMC”.

GeeXboX 2.0 includes version 10.1 “Dharma” of the open source XBMC media player and is “radically different from the 1.x series”. Zores says that the project’s philosophy remains the same: “aim at targeting the most PCs and devices as possible, in an as lightweight as possible way”. The latest release features support for a number of embedded devices running ARM SoCs such as the TI OMAP4 Pandaboard and NVIDIA Tegra 2; support for more SoCs will be added “in the months to come”.

With version 2.0 some features have been removed, including the unique ISO generator tool, legacy HDD installation and support for V4L Analog TV cards. Support for DVB Digital TV cards has also been removed but “will come back shortly”. The “GeeXboX for PC” is 72MB iso file.

Supported Architectures:

  • x86 32 and 64 bits PCs
  • ARM TI OMAP4 Pandaboard
  • ARM nVidia Tegra2 Harmony

System:

  • Linux Kernel v2.6.38.8.
  • Systemd v29.
  • BusyBox v1.19.2
  • Connman Network Manager v0.76.
  • Xorg Server v1.10.3.
  • Mesa v7.11.
  • OPKG Package Manager v0.18
  • USB persistent user data storage.

Audio Drivers:

  • ALSA v1.0.24.1.
  • Support for Analog, SPDIF and HDMI output devices.

Video Drivers:

  • Support for Intel, nVidia, ATI, Matrox and VIA GPUs.
  • Support for CRT, LCD and HDMI output devices.
  • OpenGL and OpenGL|ES hardware assisted graphics acceleration.
  • VDPAU, VA-API and Crystal HD hardware assisted video decoding for nVidia, Intel and Broadcom GPUs.

Input:

  • Mouse and Synaptics touch pads.
  • HID Keyboards.
  • Remote Controls.

Networking Features:

  • NFS shares.
  • Samba auto-discovery.
  • UPnP / DLNA media discovery.
  • ZeroConf services announcements.
  • HTTP server.
  • FTP server

MediaCenter:

  • XBMC Media Center 10.1 “Dharma” frontend.
  • Movies and TV Shows, with subtitles support.
  • Music Collection
  • Pictures and Slideshows
  • CDDA, DVD and (unencrypted) Bluray support.
  • Media Database Support.
  • Internet MovieDB / TVDB metadata and covers grabbers.
  • Skins

Download GeeXBoX.

 

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