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…
Installing from the PPA builds can be risky, so it’s highly recommended that you back up any critical information. If you accidentally break something during the ppa upgrade, keep in mind you can always re-install from one of the official builds. That being said, I recently upgraded to the Dharma Beta1 install in under 5 minutes with these commands:
Updated Instructions
(2010-09-06)
Run the below commands via shell / terminal and your box should install the updates and reboot with the new version of XBMC installed.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa sudo apt-get clean sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install xbmc sudo reboot
Original Instructions
2010-02-08
These are the original instructions that used to be on this blog post. They use a more manual method of adding the PPA repositories which is confusing for some people. They also explicitly identify with the Ubuntu ‘Jaunty’ build and are generally just confusing for most people. I’ve left them here for the time being for reference purposes, but may archive them into another post in the future.
Add the repositories — first open a nano editor for the third party sources list:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xbmc.org.list
Then copy and paste the following respository entries:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-svn/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-svn/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
Import the key:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 64234534
Update your repository list
sudo apt-get update
Then do the recommended upgrades:
sudo apt-get upgrade
Now install the latest XBMC:
sudo apt-get install xbmc
And reboot your system:
sudo reboot
I should note that after the installation / upgrade, I started getting an error message about needing OpenGL rendering enabled. A simple reinstall of the NVIDIA drivers will get you back up and running. The first time I ran into this problem I was pulling my hair out trying to get it fixed — just read this post and you’ll be back up and running in no time.
23 responses to “Upgrade XBMC Live to latest SVN”
Hi there great reading your informative articles, i am having trouble with xbmclive crashing on opening (says downloading TV show information” and sticks causing me to reboot machine. I have a dualboot setup with Windows 7 on another partition, will this method above wipe the windows 7 partition or is that safe?
thanks
Hey there, I found your blog and just wanted to say thanks!! It’s help me a great great deal!
Nice blog! 😉
It is certainly not every day that I come across a blog like this where I actually want to read other posts.
So thanks for that.
@Darren:
If you already have XBMCLive and Windows7 running in a dual boot configuration, running this upgrade should not affect your Windows7 partition. As the instructions above note, it adds a special ‘development’ repository to your list of (Linux) update sources. It then updates the list of available updates, then upgrades to the latests versions of available software (not only XBMC, but everything on the Linux/XBMCLive setup).
i am having trouble with xbmclive crashing on opening (says downloading TV show information” and sticks causing me to reboot machine.
Thanks alot, ive been searching allover for an easy way to update my live install,’now I’m finally able to run the aeon65 skin without crashes 🙂
Been bookmarking your blog for a while now to keep my XBMC up to date. Great articles. I was just about to upgrade to Dharma so I decided to read this post thinking it would be a good reference even though it’s months old. But it looks like you just updated it yesterday! Great stuff.
Thanks man and cheers
I just used your updated instructions to go from 9.11 to 10 beta 1. I did not reboot and watched my TV as XBMC simply restarted. I had been running a version of XBMCFreak’s Live CD. This seems to be working perfectly though. Thank you again for taking the time to document and share it. Much appreciated.
Upgraded from 9.11 xbmcfreak to 10.0 beta2 with no problems! Thanks
Hi
found your blog, seems so easy so thanks for your efforts
but when I putty in and try the command
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa
I get the error message
sudo: add-apt-repository: command not found
I am running Linux XBMCLive 2.6.31-16-generic #53 ubunti
I am I doing something really silly!!?
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Mark
@Mark: If you are getting the ‘command not found’ when trying to use add-apt-repository, you may need to install the python-software-properties first:
[code]sudo apt-get install python-software-properties[/code]
Hi, thanks for the post! I am having the same problem as Mark, but when I try to intall the python-software-properties, I get “E: Couldn’t find package python-software-properties”. Any ideas?
@Dave-
When you were trying the [code]sudo apt-get install python-software-properties[/code] command, did you first run [code]sudo apt-get update[/code] to make sure your local repository (of software updates/installers) was up to date?
Found my way here from your update post on the XBMC forums…
I got the ‘command not found’ response to add-apt-repository, so I did:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
it reported that python-software-properties was already up to date and set to manual install. A reboot didn’t seem to make any difference. Do I need to manually install this? if so how?
TIA!!
FreeMan
Veri good post!Thanks
Great blog. Thanks for sharing your expertize. Keep it up!;-)
Josh
I decided to read this post thinking it would be a good reference even though it’s months old. But it looks like you just updated it yesterday! Great stuff.
Thanks for these instructions. I think they worked but it has the side effect of making XBMC not recognising my external USB hard drives any more. Did you have this problem?
Thanks alot, ive been searching allover for an easy way to update my live install,’now I’m finally able to run the aeon65 skin without crashes
thanx for this xbmx article!!
Been bookmarking your blog for a while now to keep my XBMC up to date. Great articles. I was just about to upgrade to Dharma so I decided to read this post thinking it would be a good reference even though it’s months old. But it looks like you just updated it yesterday! Great stuff.
Hey Josh.
Sorry if this seems like a stupid question, but is there a way just to update the XBMC only, as I don’t want to upgrade the ubuntu version because I have a Mini-ITX board with built in GPU/CPU and it really seems to “Over Tax” the cpu and gpu if I install one of the stable release “XBMCUbuntu” versions. I am not 100% sure if this is what your description here does because being the “Noob” of all Linux noobs, I can’t quite figure out whether it upgrades just the XBMC part or the entire installation.
@Gadget-
Yes, the instructions listed above will update only XBMC. Note that the instructions above will specifically grab the update from the SVN (Subversion Source Control) which can occasionally be an unstable build. The command which tells it to start grabbing XBMC from SVN is:
[code]sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa[/code]
…so if you don’t want the SVN version, don’t run that command.
Also note that some instructions will tell you to run a apt-get upgrade command. Be cautious of this as it will try to update all features of the system which may not be what you want.