See below for some short instructions on how to upgrade your existing XBMC Live installation to the latest SVN version. It is particularly important to update your XBMC to the latest SVN version if you plan on using some of the latest and greatest plugins and skins. For example, after I installed the Aeon65 skin I noticed that the skin would crash when I would go to certain views... many of the people on the forums recommended upgrading to the latest XBMC build so I did exactly that...

After running an upgrade 'sudo apt-get ugrade' and 'sudo apt-get install xbmc' to get my system up to date my system started giving me the following error:

XBMC needs hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering.
Install an appropriate graphics driver.
Please consult XBMC Wiki for supported hardware
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Supported_hardware

The first time I had this happen to me, I spent a number of hours trying to figure out how to get my system back up... but by 3 am I gave up. The next day, I reran the XBMC Live installer and got my system back up. This time, I didn't want to have to redo all the changes I made, so I wanted to fix things. I did a bit of research and this time I tried to directly install the nvidia drivers right away before mucking around with my configuration.

It's relatively easy to setup samba shares on XBMC Live, but it does require bashing out some commands on the shell. First, you'll need to install samba using apt-get:

sudo apt-get install samba

Then, you'll want to configured your shares by editing the the file named smb.conf, placed in the /etc/samba/ directory. For example, I added the user folder and media folders to be available shares by running the following command:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Scroll down all the way to the bottom of the file, then paste in the following (use right click in Putty to paste something from your clipboard):

[xbmc]
 path = /home/xbmc
 public = yes
 guest only = yes
 writable = yes
 browseable = yes

[media]
 path = /media
 public = yes
 guest only = yes
 writable = yes
 browseable = yes

After that, restart the samba server using:

/etc/init.d/samba restart

Note: if you are having trouble with newly created files not getting the right permissions or are having trouble logging into samba, you might try adding the following lines under each of your defined shares:

force user = xbmc
inherit permissions = yes

Also, when accessing the shares from Windows, if you left the default security options you can use the account 'guest' with no password to access the shares. Otherwise, you can play with the settings to force a local linux account to be used in order to access the shares.

It's relatively easy to install GIT on XBMC Live, but I didn't find it well documented anywhere. Login to your XBMC machine console -- either via SSH / Putty or directly from the machine (Ctrl+Alt+F2). After you are logged in, run the following command:

sudo apt-get install git-core

You may need to enter your root password (default password is 'xbmc'). The system will likely prompt you to install some other required resources. Press 'Y' to install those resources.