[conspire] XBMC on UEBO M400

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ehud Kaldor (ehud.kaldor at gmail.com):

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>    Hi all,
>    I recently got a Uebo M400 (here: [1]http://uebo.net/products/m400),
>    but i must say i am not too pleased with the interface. as it is a
>    linux based appliance, i thought of trying to put some Linux distro on
>    it and run XBMC, which has an interface i like much better.
>    the device has telnet access, but i have not pro enough to know how to
>    change it to boot a different boot (internal? external device?) or if
>    it would even take it. any help or direction would be appreciated (feel
>    free to forward to anyone) as no search engine prevailed.

Ehud, you're contemplating figuring out how this thing boots in order
to, in sequence:

1.  Put a new Linux distro on it, possibly using a different boot device
(if possible), and then
2.  Install the XBMC (formerly Xbox Media Center) onto the new Linux
distro.

Rather than considering those in order, consider a XBMC showstopper:

  Portability

  While XBMC has a very portable code base, with its trunk (or mainline
  source code tree) is today officially only available for IA-32/x86,
  x86-64, PowerPC (G4 or later), and ARM-based processor architecture
  platforms, and XBMC GUI requires a Direct3D, OpenGL, OpenGL
  ES, EGL, or DirectFB with hardware accelerated graphics GPU and
  device drivers that support DirectX 9, GLES 2.0, or OpenGL 1.3 or later
  with GLSL in order to render the GUI at an acceptable frame rate to the
  human eye (which is 24 frames per second or faster). XBMC is thus
  officially not yet available for the MIPS processor architecture,
  nor does it as of yet support DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure) or
  DirectFB rendering without OpenGL/GLES hardware accelerated graphics
  support, even though MIPS, DirectFB, and DRI is the most
  popular processor architecture and DRI rendering technologies used today
  by modern stand-alone digital media players, such as those based on
  Sigma Designs and Realtek chipsets.  An XBMC port to MIPS processor
  architecture is however currently being worked on by the XBMC
  development team.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC

Your UEBO is based on a MIPS 24K V7.8-class processor.

My advice:  Give it up.  Sell the Uebo, and go visit a store to see if
you like the Boxee, which is a similar embedded device using XBMC.
We have a Boxee, and rather like it.