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 update 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.
Install Aeon / Aeon65 with git on XBMC Live
You can then use git to install themes for XBMC. For example, if you want to install Aeon65, do the following.
Change to the skins folder:
cd ~/.xbmc/skin
Get the skin via the GIT repository. You can find the git URL at the top of the GIT repository that most of the skin developers will link to in their main thread:
git clone git://github.com/temmi2000/aeon.git "Aeon65"
Note: the “Aeon65” is an optional parameter and simply downloads (gits) the skin into the Aeon65 directory. By default it would have gone in the “aeon” directory.
In the above example, the skin will get downloaded to the ‘Aeon65’ folder within the skins directory. Make sure the directory that you will be downloading to does not already exist. For example, I already had Aeon STARK in a folder called ‘Aeon’, so I downloaded the Aeon65 into a folder called Aeon65 per the command above.
Important: if you are running a stock build of XBMC (eg. not an SVN), you will probably have issues. Read my post on how to upgrade xbmc(-live) to the latest SVN. And if you are an Nvidia ION user, you may need to update your Nvidia drivers after you update xbmc to the latest SVN.
Update an XBMC skin with git
If you’d like to update your skin (which you got via git), you can navigate to that skins directory:
cd ~/.xbmc/skin/Aeon65
Then run the git pull command from that directory:
git pull
More notes: you can use git pull to update any skin that you’ve downloaded with GIT. In the example above, my skin was named Aeon65. If you just cloned Aeon65 down without renaming the folder, you will need to change directory to whatever you named the skin. If you can’t remember, you can change directory to the skin directory, then get a listing of all the files/folders:
cd ~/.xbmc/skin/
ls
Which will get you an output like the following
Aeon65 Aeon Auriga Aeon STARK Alaska Rapier Transparency!
In the example above, I’ll change directory to Aeon65 then get a listing of all files (including dot prefixed folders). What we are looking for is a .git directory to ensure this skin as downloaded with git in the first place:
cd Aeon65
ls -a
Which will get an output like the following:
. 720p extras .git language skin.xml
.. colors fonts .gitignore media sounds
If you see the git related folders, then you should be able to run a ‘git pull’ command directly from the folder you are in:
git pull
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