Well, this was a piece of a very sorry and old hardware. However, a very nice display with no visible scratches, plus initial ability to boot a skeleton of expired Windows 7 in full rez (and not just in Safe Mode of VGA) compelled me to pay $30 for it. I hoped to transform it into a relatively good HTPC running on Ubuntu Studio 13.10 and also supporting my ancient Wacom Graphire tablet. I just know quirks of Ubuntu Studio 11.04....14.04 better than say, PCLinuxOS Full Monty which includes XBMC in its distro.
Discoveries about this particular F700 hardware and its Linux behaviour were not pleasant. First of all, a combination of AMD Turion 64x2 TK-57 instead of normal (read: Intel) CPU and FY NVIDIA audio, video, Ethernet chipset proved to be combustible when put into a single laptop case. Audio has mostly perished beyond repair, only my favourite Logitech V20 USB speakers work as if nothing happened. 'nouveau' reverse-engineered FY NVIDIA video driver is buggy in FB XBMC environment and needs to be replaced by ordinary and much nicer behaving proprietary FY NVIDIA binary blob.
I made an initial mistake to get this F700 subscribed to unstable XBMC repository full of dailies, Alphas, Betas and all that jazz. Installation of XBMC via Ubuntu Software center has brought me no variants other than some unstable 13.0 version that hardly runs programs like Fusion Wizard, Navi-X. It also renders most of your favourite add-ons incompatible. So, to hell with this repository. A "regular" uninstalling may not work, your .userdata in .xbmc may remain poisoned with incompatibility, so this command should be issued:
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:team-xbmc/unstable
Once I had this repository:
- https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/xbmc-nightly ppa:team-xbmc/xbmc-nightly
It needs to go, too. In the meantime, XBMC wiki presents this path to upgrading XBMC:
sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:team-xbmc/unstable sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa sudo apt-get remove xbmc xbmc-bin sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get install xbmc xbmc-bin
That is, when any add all add-ons will become compatible with XBMC 13.x Gotham. It might take the whole year of 2014 though.
Uninstall your sorry buggy Gotham XBMC now.
And do not forget to delete .xbmc in your home directory, "regular" deinstallation never touches this poisoned data.
Now add this, the only "good" repo:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
and restart Ubuntu Software center. It should show you a nice XBMC 12.3 distro.
You may also want to have XBMCbuntu on USB stick which can be handy for both on this F700 machine and for other computers. It takes couple sticks though for different architectures, and maybe some remastering to keep add-ons and tuning intact between reboots, but it's handy still. Openelec might be the best distro for XBMC on Raspberry Pi and/or Cubie Truck (cubieboard3), I don't know, my flea market don't sell these boards. And in any case, they sell between $50 and $150, and there's a monitor missing, while my trashy Compaq Presario F700 cost me $30 (+$20 for 16 GB SSD).
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