as above really, after some advice on sorting my media.

 

ive installed xmbc to my laptop (which only ever gets used for films) as a stand alone system with no windows installed, so it boots very quickly into xmbc. but i cant work out how to install my films etc to the laptops hard drive :-( it works fine playing things off a memory stick, but ive got a 250GB harddrive with sod all on it. any ideas? cheers

Your best bet would be to download a CD like GParted, that allows you to boot into a very basic OS environment, that is capable of create/deleting/moving partitions. Re-Size your existing partition, down to something like 50GB, just to make sure it has enough. Then, create a partition, just for your music, then, plug the hard drives that contain the music, into the laptop, copy them over to the partition you just created (Still in GParted here), then bounce out of GParted and restart XMBC.

 

I did use XMBC, but as an application on my Linux machines and it was never very stable, what's it like now?

it seems pretty stable now, but its certainly not the easiest to use as an OS. might take some getting used to. do you know of any other options for booting very quickly into a media player?

Yeah just use Linux and run XMBC on top of it :D I know you're probably running XMBC Linux, but tbh it's so much easier to run something like Ubuntu and run XMBC as an app at startup :D

downloading ubuntu now :-) im sure there arre better players than xmbc out that u can run on linux, ill have a scout about :-) cheers pal

np bud, Linux is kinda my life, it's both a passion and what I do for a living, so if you get stuck, just gimme a shout.

Just had a thought too, you'll probably be better off with kubuntu rather than ubuntu, because kubuntu uses a menu system very similar to Windows. You can either download a kubuntu cd instead of an ubuntu one, OR once ubuntu is installed, go through the menu to open "terminal" then type "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" that will then take a while as it downloads all the files and libraries etc. Then just log out of ubuntu and set the "desktop environment" to "kde" on the login screen ;) But like I said, if you get stuck just ask ;)