You can use the following command to remotely start music playing on XBMC. The examples below were sent while I was SSH'ed into the XBMC machine. As you'll notice from the music paths, I am using some of the 'special' paths which call up the LastFM tags of Rap and Alternative.

xbmc-send -a "PlayMedia(lastfm://globaltags/rap)"

xbmc-send -a "PlayMedia(lastfm://globaltags/alternative)"

I should note that each LastFM request is mutually exclusive of the other. Meaning each time you send a new PlayMedia request, the old genre/tag will stop playing and the new one will start playing.

I'll add to this later when I start documenting some of the various URLs and functions that can be used to start playing music. A list of functions that can be sent can be found on the XBMC wiki.

See below for some short instructions on how to upgrade your existing XBMC Live installation to the latest SVN version. These instructions should also work for regular XBMC Linux users as well. 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 (to the latest SVN) I started getting 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 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.