Raspberry Pi question

Sun Mar 8 15:20:16 MST 2015

"But what should the capacity of the card for Raspbmc be?"
Ooo!  I love questions like this!  The correct answer is, "It depends."  :D

The more meaningful answer is, it depends on how much content (music files, videos, etc.) you want to store on your Raspbmc at one time.  You can have your Raspbmc stream files from other PCs/sources if you want, and if you did it that way you might not need your Raspbmc SD card to be very large.  I don't have mine streaming, so everything is stored right on the SD card.  I opted for 32 GB, which means I don't have to change out files (delete old already-watched stuff so I can put new unwatched stuff on) very often.

So if you're going to stream content to your Raspbmc, I would say a 4 GB SD card would be fine.  If you want to store a lot of content statically on the Raspbmc, I would suggest 32 GB (or higher).

"One final question: is this where you got your Raspbmc?"
Yes, that's it.  (It probably wasn't the place I got mine when I installed it a few years back, but this looks to be the official place nowadays.)

"I assume you just treat it like you would install it onto a hard drive."
Pretty much.  I think when I created my Raspbmc image there wasn't an installer program available (like it looks there is now).  So I just got a raw image and used dd to write the image file onto the SD card.

"Does that take care of the persistence as well?"
Yes, absolutely.  Everything you do on your SD card on a RPi (whether you're running Raspbian, Raspbmc, etc.) acts just like a hard drive, in that it stores settings, configuration, data files, etc.

A few additional bits of recommendation I'll provide:
1.  Be Careful
    Whatever method you use to get the Raspbmc image onto
    your SD card (whether fancy installer program or raw
    writing of bits using dd), make sure you're writing
    the image to the correct /dev/sdX device.  A tool like
    dd will happily write an image to whatever device you
    specify without any kind of sanity checking to ensure
    you're not over-writing and killing your root partition.
2.  Partition (if necessary)
    If you go the route of having a very large SD card to
    hold lots of static data, partition your SD card into
    maybe a 4 GB partition for Raspbmc itself, and the
    remainder of the SD card to purely hold data.  I found
    this was a great way to keep the system area relatively
    small and made it super convenient to perform system-
    wide backups of your Raspbmc build by using dd.  And
    you only have to worry about the system partition and
    not the 14 GB of data files you have stored, because
    why back those up in a system backup?  I do a backup
    prior to any Raspbmc upgrade, so if there's any
    failures it's incredibly easy to flash right back to
    a known good state.  (I disable the automatic updating
    to nightly builds that Raspbmc wants to do.)  Do this
    partitioning of the card before you do the installing,
    and you'll be able to specify the right partition for
    installation.
3.  Stay Classy
    Whichever size SD card you opt for to suit the way you
    are going to use the system, make sure the SD card you
    get is Class 10.  It may actually be pretty hard to
    even find the lower classes (slower access times) these
    days, but it's worth ensuring.  Class 10 all the way.

Good luck with it!
Cheers.

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Michael Havens
Sent: Sunday, March 8, 2015 14:57
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: Raspberry Pi question

I am sorry to say that my Pi is likely a version 1 as I can find nowhere that states it is a version 2. It is also likely because it was only 40 dollars after my 20 dollar cashback bonus from my discover card.

YOu mention that I should get other cards? Okay. But what should the capacity of the card for Raspbmc be?

One final question: is this where you got your Raspbmc?
http://www.raspbmc.com/download/ I assume you just treat it like you would install it onto a hard drive. Does that take care of the persistence as well?

:-)~MIKE~(-:

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Rusty Ramser
Sent: Sunday, March 8, 2015 14:19
To: 'Main PLUG discussion list'
Subject: RE: Raspberry Pi question

Hi, Michael.

Sorry if this isn't the solution you're looking for, but what I've done with my RPi is...

1.  Keep one SD card with the Raspbian image on it.
2.  Get another SD card (large capacity) to put Raspbmc on.
3.  Get yet another SD card (lower capacity) to put Arch on.

SD cards are so cheap these days (especially something in the 4-8 GB range), I wouldn't want to completely eliminate one of the builds I had to replace it with another.  Not when you can have all these different "hard drives" of SD cards that are so easily changed in and out.

Hey, BTW, did you get a v1 or v2 RPi?  Since the v2 was announced, I've been planning on getting one to replace my Raspbmc functionality, but kind of wanted to know if the graphics capability was substantially better with v2 (like the processing capability seems to be).  If there's one issue I have with the v1 RPi I have running Raspbmc it's that sometimes the graphics on playbacks flakes out a bit and portions of the screen go green or don't update for a few seconds.

Cheers.

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Michael Havens
Sent: Sunday, March 8, 2015 13:46
To: PLUG
Subject: 

hi guys, I got a problem. I ordered a Raspberry PI to run XBMC (aka
Kodi) on so I can return the NUC to my father. The PI installs an IS called Raspian (a modified Debian). I am now having problems insralling XBMC (aka Kodi). Here is what happens:

I ran apt-get upgrade- no problem
~ $ sudo apt-get install xbmc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 xbmc : Depends: xbmc-bin (>= 2:11.0~git20120510.82388d5-1) but it is not installable
        Depends: xbmc-bin (< 2:11.0~git20120510.82388d5-1.1~) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

 ~ $ sudo apt-get install xbmc-bin
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package xbmc-bin is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source

E: Package 'xbmc-bin' has no installation candidate

So what do I need to do? Whenever I install xbmc from a n ubuntu based os it installs with no problem. Every other time I installed it onto a debian based os it installed with no problems.
Another thing, I am also supposed to add a repository but this is the
result:

 ~ $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo: add-apt-repository: command not found  ~ $ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo: apt-add-repository: command not found

I believe I added the repository onto a debian based os before but if it is not possible this is operator error.
--
:-)~MIKE~(-:
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