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 configure 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

Update: It looks like this has changed in the more recent versions of Ubuntu that the XBMC Live distribution is packaged with (10.04). You can restart the samba service using the old method:

sudo service smbd restart
sudo service nmbd restart

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
 force user = xbmc
 inherit permissions = yes

[media]
 path = /media
 public = yes
 guest only = yes
 writable = yes
 browseable = yes
 force user = xbmc
 inherit permissions = yes

After that, restart the samba server using:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

Note: I updated the samba configuration above to include the 'force user' and 'inherit permissions' features as I was having trouble with newly created files not getting the right permissions and logging into samba.

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.

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.

I should also note that on occasion this command will not restart XBMC live. The alternative is to stop, then start XBMC again using the following commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/xbmc-live stop
sudo /etc/init.d/xbmc-live start 

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.