To boldly go where ....

It's been a while since I wrote anything HTPC related. The reason is that I set up the HTPC as best I could, but I didn't own a HDTV. Until last Saturday (29/05/2010) when I got a Samsung 40" LCD. However after 6 hours out of the box, it breaks. :( :( :( One of the panels started distorting the picture. I'm in the process of sorting out a replacement.

However it does give me something to try out the HTPC on. Boot it up, and lovely XBMC appears. Some config tweaking and voila, full HD playback.

All is not well though.

I did a portage upgrade and amongst other packages the ati-drivers got upgraded to 10.5. Now I have a problem with XBMC hanging when I push stop on the remote. I've posted to the XBMC forums if anyone has any ideas. I tried downgrading to 10.2 but got blocked (see this forum post)

While investigating the above issue, I also found (IMO) a borked ebuild for XBMC for xbmc-9.11-r4. I had 9.11-r3 installed and I thought upgrading to 9.11-r4 might fix my blank screen problem. Seems 9.11-r4 has a dependency on Python 2.4, when the rest of Gentoo (at least on my boxes) is using 2.6 Looking into this it's because the XBMC scripting engine is 2.4 based. There's a Gentoo forum post on the matter. Why the ebuild is borked is because (from the associated bug report)

If I understand the problem correctly, than its not a matter of the python-version. Xbmc has made a few patches/additions to python, which aren't upstream. The included python has this patches, python as an external library misses this features.

So putting a dependency on an external 2.4 python interpreter WONT EVEN FIX THE PROBLEM

What should be done is to incorporate the suggestion made by comment 12 in the bug report into the ebuild. As comment 15 pointed out, having an external python 2.4 interpreter will fix somethings, but not everything, where as using the bundled interpreter with XBMC will ensure all plugins working (as far as the infrastructure is concerned).

I updated my xbmc-9.11-r4 ebuild and it built fine. Doesn't fix my XBMC hanging problem though.