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 which will install the git utility:

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.

I always forget the command for restarting XBMC Live from the shell, so I figured I would post it to my blog. It's a really simple, one-line command:

sudo /etc/init.d/xbmc-live restart

Then enter the password for the root account (typically 'xbmc').

Just to be clear, the benefit of running this command instead of a full reboot (sudo reboot) is the above command only restarts the XBMC Live application. This means if you have any other services or apps running (like SABnzbd+), you can keep those apps running.

The only reason I've ever really needed the xbmc-live restart command is when something gets locked up on XBMC... and that usually only happens when I'm trying out new skins or plugins.

After getting XBMC Live installed on my Revo and getting my library setup, I couldn't find a simple option to have XBMC watch my video folder and automatically update my library. In place of this missing functionality, I figured I would setup a simple timed job to automatically update my library for me every hour.

Before I get started, I should note that there is an option to automatically update the library when the box is booted up which may work for some people. You can find this under System > Video > Update Library on Startup. This option wouldn't work for me though as I leave my box on 24/7 or at most just put it in a standby state.

See below for the details on how to setup a timed job (cron) to update your video or music library. This consists of installing the xbmc-send application and setting up a cron job (and enabling the EventServer).

I've read all about WinSXS (Side by Side) and how it tries to solve the DLL Hell problems that have plagued Windows for ages, but I thought it was ridiculous that this folder was taking up over 10 gigs of precious space on my 64 GB solid state drive. A few months back, I replaced my laptop's optical drive with a 500 gig HDD to try to move some of my media and documents over. However, when I went to install the latest service pack to Visual Studio today, I noticed I didn't have enough space to install it. I used a simple tool called TreeSize Free to analyze the disk space and see what was taking up all the room. A quick drill down of the largest item showed that the WinSXS folder was talking up 10.2 GB of space.