Update on the Raspbmc project

Things are moving along with the Raspberry Pi boards and the guys running the Raspberry Pi XMBC port have posted an update on the project. First off they have a shiny new logo and to go with the logo they have a draft version of the Windows installer.

They have also completed early version of Linux and OSX installers, you can download the Windows installer from here and the source code for the Mono installer is here. As well as that they have been working on the Linux based installer for the Raspberry Pi board, details below.

It’s great to see the project develop, I can’t wait to get my hands on one of the boards and load up XBMC.

As I am approaching the project’s development via installation first (as the target system should be an easier job), the next logical step is the Linux based installer that must run on the system itself. This will be known as theRAMDISTRIBUTION. This is because it will load itself into the memory of the Raspberry Pi, allowing the original contents of the SD card that booted to be overwritten. The advantage to this over a direct image installation, is that the ram based distribution will be able to adapt for any card size that exists, as the ext4 partition will simply be placed on the end and dynamically created.

So, where did I get to with this? Well. I was pushing up some sources so I could build the ram based distribution, and consolidating a series of scripts I had written (I’m sure devs will prefer a single ./script-to-build). Building the ram distribution takes a few stages, namely:

1. We build a kernel for the device, and a kernel for QEMU – to finish the foreign debootstrap.
2. We build a bootable partition for the device with the modules and GPU binaries, such as start.elf
3. We initialise QEMU upon an ext4 filesystem and finish the debootstrap and configure the installer.
4. Build an image to encapsulate everything: the vfat partition, the ext4 partition and a swap file.

The current sources are here