XBMC Project - Post 3 - Operating Systems for Raspberry pi

Story Board:

1. Post 1: http://blog.karthiksunil.com/2013/07/installing-home-media-centre-dyi-xbmc.html
2. Post 2: http://blog.karthiksunil.com/2013/07/xbmc-project-what-you-need.html

Before you go ahead with the installation let's see how to connect things together

Connecting Pi to TV and other gadgets is as simple as plugging in power adapter to your laptop.

• Connect your HDMI cable to Pi and TV
• Insert SD Card
• Insert your mobile power adapter to Pi (micro USB) - Make sure that current rating is more than 700mA
• If you have wireless adapter, plug it in one of the USB ports
• Plug key board in another USB port for initial setup

And that's it..

Now you have got Pi, you have got power of a computing engine on your palm. Many people use Pi in very different purpose. Most popular flavor is to use it as an XBMC server. This series of posts is to achieve the same. We have many options of OSs to be installed on Pi. Refere http://elinux.org/RPi_Distributions

As our goal is to implement XBMC on Pi, let's concentrate on XBMC distributions. Following are the options . (http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Raspberry_Pi/FAQ#Installing_XBMC_on_the_Raspberry_Pi)

1. Raspbian
2. OpenELEC
3. Xbian

I have instaled OpenELEC and recommed strongly. However, OpenELEC works very smoothly when installed on USB Drive instead of SD card. I will write a separate post on it. Advantage of OpenELEC is that, it has been build from the scratch for the purpose of XBMC and only XBMC. Its light, fast and accurate. Visit openelec.tv 

My next post will be on instaling OpenELEC on SD card and then move to USB drive for snappiness.