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What is GeeXboX ?
GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at
turning your computer into a so called HTPC (Home Theater PC)
or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution,
it's a ready to boot operating system than works on any
Pentium-class x86 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software
requirement. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the
whole system being loaded in RAM.
Despite his tiny ISO image size, the distribution comes with a
complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any
driver to be added. It supports playback of nearly any kind of
audio/video and image files and all known codecs and
containers are shipped in, allowing playing them through
various physical supports, either being CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or
Internet.
GeeXboX also comes with a complete toolchain that allows
developers adding easily extra packages and features but that
might also be used to give birth to many dedicated embedded
Linux systems.
GeeXboX 2.0-alpha2 release
(03/13/2010)
It's already been one month since 2.0-alpha1 release so here's alpha2.
This release fixes a lot of bugs that have been encountered by our
users on this first 2.x series preview.
- Normalize LIRC configuration by providing generic binding for
each and every remote control.
- Initial port to ARM architecture: stay tuned, it's gonna be
awesome news soon :-)
- Restoration of UPnP/DLNA feature with a brand new stack.
- Restoration of internationalization support.
- Upgrade of nVidia drivers: proprietary, legacy one and
addition of Nouveau.
- Add Kernel Mode Settings (KMS) for ATI/Intel/nVidia drivers.
- Upgrade to Linux 2.6.33 kernel.
- Fix LiveCD and Win32 installers, you can now install GeeXboX
to disk again.
- Fix OGG files playback issue.
- Upgrade Enna to future upcoming 0.5.0 release, including hundreds
of bug fixes and new features such as Weather enhancements, GeoIP
localization, UPnP support, SHOUTcast and Podcast streaming.
Generator is still not yet ready for prime-time but we're
working on it. That said, feel free to download this new 2.0-alpha2
release. It had been made available for
i386
and
x86_64
computers.
The
light
and
full
sources of this release
obviously are available too.
You can also install it without further disk partitionning through the
Windows
installer.
GeeXboX 2.0-alpha1 release
(02/14/2010)
This has been announced for years but we're finally stepping forward to
the so long awaited for 2.0 release of GeeXboX. Today, we're proud to
let you have a first try at this new version, based on the
Enna
Media Center application that we have
developed.
Enna is a standalone application that one can use on any Linux
distribution (soon to be available for MacOSX and Windows users, who
knows ...) that replaces the old and dying MPlayer OSD interface we've
been using for so long. The GeeXboX distribution you all know about
will then become the Enna Live-CD project, but with all optimizations,
configuration and tweakings that one may be able to do on his regular
computer.
With Enna, GeeXboX now looks promising again, with this new shiny look
and feel interface. Also being much more nicer, Enna allows us to add
so many new features that you all were waiting for (check out the
Enna
website for that) so future looks bright again.
Also, Enna has been designed to be simple and intuitive to be used.
It can be controlled either through keyboard, mouse or remote control.
Mouse support is quite new in GeeXboX but its usage is kinda trivial.
As for keyboard, we have tried to make usable with as few keys as
possible. As a result, one can control Enna the following way:
- Arrows: used to navigate between the different menu lists.
- Enter: used to validate your selection.
- Backspace: used to cancel or browse back to previous menu.
- Escape: if you ever wanna stop Enna (and shutdown GeeXboX
as well).
As you might have understood, Enna and GeeXboX v2.x design is the
result of years of development and deep architectural changes.
Things now are getting stabilized but we're still lacking of manpower
to enhance it the way we'd like it to be. So if you're a Linux
developer, feel free to join our team. If you're interested in GeeXboX
v2.x architecture, you'd be glad to know that it was presented to
FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting)
a week ago and both
slides
and
video
are available.
We all hope you'll enjoy this first alpha release of GeeXboX 2.x
series. Though, keep in mind that, as the name suggests, it's an alpha
version only. This means that unfortunately, it still suffers a lot of
bugs and many regressions towards 1.x series. The availability of final
stable release over requires you to test it the most you can,
reporting any trouble one can find.
As a consequence, some stuff are already know to be broken or
missing:
- Some features are disabled, including TV and netstreams
support.
- Generator needs a huge rewrite and will be part of alpha2
release only, sorry folks.
- Audio OGG files are seen as video files (!!) and playing them
back results in a black screen with uncontrollable Enna
(you've warned).
- The framebuffer-based console mode has been disabled until being
fixed. HDTV mode only (i.e. using X.Org server) is supported in
this version.
On the bright side, new features have been added or enabled by
default:
- The proprietary nVidia video driver has been integrated.
Every nVidia GPU should now be supported. With those cards, Enna
should also be using its OpenGL rendering engine, providing a
smooth rendering.
- The VDPAU hardware decoding engine has been integrated. If you're
the lucky owner of an nVidia card higher than GF8800 series,
than you should be able to decode MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (i.e. DivX), H.264
and VC-1 streams using your video card, offloading your CPU.
This of course includes ION-based Set-Top-Boxes that are now able
to decode 1080p videos.
- For non-nVidia users, the multi-threaded decoding feature now has
been enabled by default. MPlayer will then uses all of your CPU's
cores to do software video decoding.
In order to allow us to enhance GeeXboX to our users' configuration,
we've also setup a statistics utility that provides us with some
information regarding your hardware configuration. It has been enabled
by default but we know that it can be intrusive for some users. So if
you're not willing to provide these info (CPU model, amount of memory
RAM, video board type, and such ...), you can disable it by adding
nostats to the boot command-line.
That said, feel free to download our new 2.0-alpha1 release.
It had been made available for
i386
and
x86_64
computers.
The
light
and
full
sources of this release
obviously are available too.
Initial release of Enna: v0.4.0
(01/03/2010)
It was kinda hard and efforts were countless, but GeeXboX team is proud
to announce the very stable release of
Enna
Media Center.
After months of development, this brand new user interface finally has
landed. Enna is available as a standalone application for all modern
GNU/Linux based distributions (and already packaged for Ubuntu 9.10)
and will, obviously, be part of GeeXboX v2.0 release. Speaking of
which, the hardest part now being behind us, the first Alpha1 release
of GeeXboX v2 is due to this month.
In the mean time, feel free to test Enna on your regular PC and we
really hope you'll enjoy using it. More information are of course
available on
Enna
website.