GeeXboX 2.0

GeeXboX 2.0 has landed …
September 17th, 2011 ben No comments

After countless years of development, the 2.0 release of GeeXboX (codename “Love It or Shove It”) finally has landed. The GeeXboX project was created in December 2002, 9 years ago, to become the major HTPC / MediaCenter dedicated Linux distribution. From a ridiculous 3 MB ISO image, using an ultra-simple customized version of MPlayer OSD, GeeXboX now has evolved into a much more mature system. Our objective always has been to provide you with a Linux distribution, so easy to use, that anyone, regardless of any computer skill, would be able to make use of it.

Over the years, the project has evolved to always provide more features and bring support to more and more hardware devices, which we managed to do, at some cost. The architecture that has been originally designed, with the whole UI being MPlayer’s OSD, prevented us from easily adding major features and the look&feel started to look deprecated within the years. We’ve then been struggling for months and years to design this v2.0 version, switching from one Media Center project to another (or even creating our own), using MPUI, Freevo and then Enna, to finally stick with the most powerful one, the reference: XBMC. Our team always has been too small numbered and managing a distribution takes resources. We had no other choice but to understand that we just can’t compete, so let’s just integrate the best components to make one nice product.

So here we are now, and we’re here for good. This new GeeXboX 2.0 release is the accomplishment of hours, days, months of efforts from a lot of people. It is radically different from the 1.x series and, sorry to disappoint some of you, will not provide the same level of services. We are now doing much more things than we used to do with 1.x but unfortunately, a few things have to be left over. But GeeXboX philosophy remains the same and we still aim at targeting the most PCs and devices as possible, in an as lightweight as possible way. The ISO image of “GeeXboX for PC” edition now hits 72 MB, much bigger than it used to be, sure, but still probably one of the lightest distributions you may have seen. GeeXboX now also support many embedded devices running ARM SoCs (such as TI OMAP4 Pandaboard and nVidia Tegra 2) and many much more will be added in the months to come. These devices just make the perfect fanless, energy-efficient HTPC and GeeXboX just make the perfect MediaCenter distribution for those.

But enough with the speech and let’s see what’s behind the hood:

Supported Architectures:

x86 32 and 64 bits PCs
ARM TI OMAP4 Pandaboard
ARM nVidia Tegra2 Harmony

System:

Linux Kernel v2.6.38.8.
Systemd v29.
BusyBox v1.19.2
Connman Network Manager v0.76.
Xorg Server v1.10.3.
Mesa v7.11.
OPKG Package Manager v0.18
USB persistent user data storage.

Audio Drivers:

ALSA v1.0.24.1.
Support for Analog, SPDIF and HDMI output devices.

Video Drivers:

Support for Intel, nVidia, ATI, Matrox and VIA GPUs.
Support for CRT, LCD and HDMI output devices.
OpenGL and OpenGL|ES hardware assisted graphics acceleration.
VDPAU, VA-API and Crystal HD hardware assisted video decoding for nVidia, Intel and Broadcom GPUs.

Input:

Mouse and Synaptics touch pads.
HID Keyboards.
Remote Controls.

Networking Features:

NFS shares.
Samba auto-discovery.
UPnP / DLNA media discovery.
ZeroConf services announcements.
HTTP server.
FTP server

MediaCenter:

XBMC Media Center 10.1 “Dharma” frontend.
Movies and TV Shows, with subtitles support.
Music Collection
Pictures and Slideshows
CDDA, DVD and (unencrypted) Bluray support.
Media Database Support.
Internet MovieDB / TVDB metadata and covers grabbers.
Skins

Some features however have vanished. among them, one can note that support for DVB Digital TV cards has been removed (but will come back shortly), support for V4L Analog TV cards has been deprecated (this time dead once for all), GeeXboX unique ISO generator also has perished (not that useful anymore), as well as legacy HDD installation (which has been superseded Live USB support with persistent data storage).

GeeXboX for PCs still is provided as a directly burnable ISO image though it is much more common these days to use it as a Live USB distribution instead of a Live CD one. We extended this feature with a persistent user data storage capability that allows you to keep your configuration, media database, downloaded media covers, lyrics … among reboots. No configuration is needed and everything can be done quite easily through Unetbootin.

We’ve put a lot of hard work into this new GeeXboX release and we truly hope it’ll suits all of your geeky needs. Next steps are up to you: download it, put it on some USB key, reboot your PC and sit on your couch :-)


GeeXboX 2.0-alpha2 release (03/13/2010)
It's already been one month since 2.0-alpha1 release so here's alpha2. This release fixes a lot of bugs that have been encountered by our users on this first 2.x series preview.

* Normalize LIRC configuration by providing generic binding for each and every remote control.
* Initial port to ARM architecture: stay tuned, it's gonna be awesome news soon :-)
* Restoration of UPnP/DLNA feature with a brand new stack.
* Restoration of internationalization support.
* Upgrade of nVidia drivers: proprietary, legacy one and addition of Nouveau.
* Add Kernel Mode Settings (KMS) for ATI/Intel/nVidia drivers.
* Upgrade to Linux 2.6.33 kernel.
* Fix LiveCD and Win32 installers, you can now install GeeXboX to disk again.
* Fix OGG files playback issue.
* Upgrade Enna to future upcoming 0.5.0 release, including hundreds of bug fixes and new features such as Weather enhancements, GeoIP localization, UPnP support, SHOUTcast and Podcast streaming.


GeeXboX 2.0-alpha1 release (02/14/2010)
This has been announced for years but we're finally stepping forward to the so long awaited for 2.0 release of GeeXboX. Today, we're proud to let you have a first try at this new version, based on the Enna Media Center application that we have developed.

Enna is a standalone application that one can use on any Linux distribution (soon to be available for MacOSX and Windows users, who knows ...) that replaces the old and dying MPlayer OSD interface we've been using for so long. The GeeXboX distribution you all know about will then become the Enna Live-CD project, but with all optimizations, configuration and tweakings that one may be able to do on his regular computer.

With Enna, GeeXboX now looks promising again, with this new shiny look and feel interface. Also being much more nicer, Enna allows us to add so many new features that you all were waiting for (check out the Enna website for that) so future looks bright again.

Also, Enna has been designed to be simple and intuitive to be used. It can be controlled either through keyboard, mouse or remote control. Mouse support is quite new in GeeXboX but its usage is kinda trivial. As for keyboard, we have tried to make usable with as few keys as possible. As a result, one can control Enna the following way:

* Arrows: used to navigate between the different menu lists.
* Enter: used to validate your selection.
* Backspace: used to cancel or browse back to previous menu.
* Escape: if you ever wanna stop Enna (and shutdown GeeXboX as well).


Enna Music Menu Enna Photo Wall Enna Video Info

As you might have understood, Enna and GeeXboX v2.x design is the result of years of development and deep architectural changes. Things now are getting stabilized but we're still lacking of manpower to enhance it the way we'd like it to be. So if you're a Linux developer, feel free to join our team. If you're interested in GeeXboX v2.x architecture, you'd be glad to know that it was presented to FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) a week ago and both slides and video are available.

We all hope you'll enjoy this first alpha release of GeeXboX 2.x series. Though, keep in mind that, as the name suggests, it's an alpha version only. This means that unfortunately, it still suffers a lot of bugs and many regressions towards 1.x series. The availability of final stable release over requires you to test it the most you can, reporting any trouble one can find.

As a consequence, some stuff are already know to be broken or missing:

* Some features are disabled, including TV and netstreams support.
* Generator needs a huge rewrite and will be part of alpha2 release only, sorry folks.
* Audio OGG files are seen as video files (!!) and playing them back results in a black screen with uncontrollable Enna (you've warned).
* The framebuffer-based console mode has been disabled until being fixed. HDTV mode only (i.e. using X.Org server) is supported in this version.


On the bright side, new features have been added or enabled by default:

* The proprietary nVidia video driver has been integrated. Every nVidia GPU should now be supported. With those cards, Enna should also be using its OpenGL rendering engine, providing a smooth rendering.
* The VDPAU hardware decoding engine has been integrated. If you're the lucky owner of an nVidia card higher than GF8800 series, than you should be able to decode MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (i.e. DivX), H.264 and VC-1 streams using your video card, offloading your CPU. This of course includes ION-based Set-Top-Boxes that are now able to decode 1080p videos.
* For non-nVidia users, the multi-threaded decoding feature now has been enabled by default. MPlayer will then uses all of your CPU's cores to do software video decoding.


In order to allow us to enhance GeeXboX to our users' configuration, we've also setup a statistics utility that provides us with some information regarding your hardware configuration. It has been enabled by default but we know that it can be intrusive for some users. So if you're not willing to provide these info (CPU model, amount of memory RAM, video board type, and such ...), you can disable it by adding nostats to the boot command-line.


GeeXboX 1.2.4: fix release (10/11/2009)
Some commercial DVD decryption bug having been spotted out on GeeXboX forums, we had to fix it through this minor 1.2.4 release. In the mean time, you'll be pleased to hear that 2.x development branch has been greatly stabilized recently and we should be able to provide the first alpha release by end of year.


GeeXboX 1.2.3: fix release (07/10/2009)
As it appeared that a nasty bug with some AC3 audio encoded files slipped through previous 1.2.2 release, here's another minor release. No big changes here except from AC3 playback recovery.


GeeXboX 1.2.2: features enhancement release (06/19/2009)
Detailed Changelog (relative to 1.2.1 release):

- Multi-threaded video decoding for MPEG-1/2/4 and H.264 codecs.
- Support for newly discovered DVD MovieProtect encryption method.
- Extended DVD CSS descrambiling capabilities.
- Removal of GOOM audio visualization (was causing too much troubles).
- Automount daemon enhancements.
- Upgrade of MPlayer and its set of codecs.


GeeXboX 1.2.1: security-fix release (02/11/2009)
While working on 2.0 development, we managed to find a few major bugs in 1.2 release codebase. There were a major flaw in installator which may (in some cases) lead to destroy your HDD's MBR while trying to install to a removable USB key plus a few minor bugs with EeePC 701 frequency scaling and parallel port LCD driver support.
It is highly recommended that you use this new version instead.

GeeXboX 1.2.1 (for x86_32, x86_64 and powerpc computers) is available right here and now!


GeeXboX 1.2: 'Broadcast simultaneously one year in the future' edition (01/31/2009)
Here we finally are. Today marks GeeXboX 1.2 release that was awaited for such a long time. This is a really important step for the project, being the very latest release from the 1.x series. The 1.2 took quite a long time to emerge but brought a lot of features, the most important ones being the x86_64 architecture support and the HDTV and widescreens optimizations through X.Org inclusion. We've also added a brand new tool, called Win32 installer that allows you installing GeeXboX to your current hard-disk without need of partitionning/formatting it again. Please feel free to browse Changelogs from all 1.2 beta releases for a complete list of changes.

So again, GeeXboX 1.2 is the last version you'll see that relies on our original MPlayer OSD based blue screen user interface. Over the years (and especially last months), a lot of efforts have been made to work on the upcoming 2.x series, that will feature a complete rework of the UI, based on the ultra fast and shiny Enlightenment toolkit. We already have made very good progress on this nextgen architecture and the first 2.0-alpha1 release will probably be out in a few weeks for tests purpose.

Eager and impatient folks can have a look at exclusive screenshots of what 2.x interface will looks like. So just wait for a couple more weeks for this.

GeeXboX v2 Menu GeeXboX v2 Music Menu GeeXboX v2 Browser
GeeXboX v2 Music GeeXboX v2 Photo GeeXboX v2 Video


But let's get back to 1.2. This is our very latest stable release and will stay so for quite a while, until 2.0 is fully ready for use. With this release, we've done our best to please everyone in order to provide you with best video playback experience and we hope it'll keep on going.

Detailed Changelog (relative to 1.2-beta3 release):

System:
- Upgrade to Linux 2.6.27.13.
- Use On-Demand CPU frequency scaling policy.

X.Org:
- Upgrade X.Org ATI driver to 6.10.0.

Player:
- Fix VCD playback issues.
- Disable GOOM audio visualization, was sucking down CPU too much.
- Fix some TV card bad color effects.

Installator:
- Simplify installator partitionning step.
- Unify disk install, using GRUB on USB devices too.

Miscellaneous:
- Fix a mounting issue when 2 hardware devices have the same name.
- Add support for disks with no partition table (Ex: Win32 formatted USB keys).
- Add a Win32 utility that allows installing GeeXboX to your current hard-disk without need of partitionning/formatting it again.
- Add USB network drivers to emulate a NIC.


GeeXboX 1.2-beta3 (12/28/2008)
Ok, beta2 was not the last one and here comes beta3 which is definitely candidate for 1.2 release. We've performed a huge amount of bug fixes in various area and were able to correct some long standing issues we had. Two major changes come with this release: a completely new automounter that now relies on D-BUS and HAL and the restoration of installer feature. So yeah, finally (it's been time ...), you should be able to install GeeXboX again, on both your HDDs and USB keys. Other parts of GeeXboX also welcomed a few changes, mostly regarding the player, that received a few fixes for AudioCDs, DVDs, AAC and RealVideo 9 playback.

Detailed Changelog (relative to 1.2-beta2 release):

System:
- Upgrade Linux kernel to 2.6.27.10
- Rework of installator, now works fine with both HDD and USB installs.

X.Org:
- ATI Radeon driver upgrade.
- ATI Rage128 driver addition.

Player:
- Updated MPlayer to r28184 (provides native RealVideo 9 / RV30 decoder).
- Use FAAD2 for AAC decoding (fixes many audio playback issues).
- Fix CDDA/DVD playback issues.

Networking:
- Add optional Samba server support.

Miscellaneous:
- Complete rework of automounter, now based on D-BUS/HAL.
- Mounted disks names are now much more eloquent.
- Fix some disc eject issues.
- Add optionnal disc images (.bin, .iso, .img, .mdf, .nrg) mounter.
- Restore the old menu font.


GeeXboX 1.2-beta2 (12/14/2008)
Here comes GeeXboX 1.2 second beta release. Thanks to your feedback on forums, we've been able to iron out a lot of nasty bugs from beta1. There's no major changes in terms of features but the distribution is now much more stable, which is always a good thing. Most of the corrections took place at the driver level, as many people encountered some issues with hardware support. The few PowerPC users that still exist will also be pleased to know that we've manage to resurrect the port to this architecture (latest release was 1.0, more than 2 years ago).

We truely hope it'll be the very latest beta release before 1.2 comes out. In the mean time, just test this one out.

Detailed Changelog (relative to 1.2-beta1 release):

System:
- Upgrade Linux kernel to 2.6.27.9
- Massive firmwares support upgrades: fixes many driver loading issues.

Toolchain:
- Update uClibc to 0.9.30.

Ports:
- Restore PowerPC architecture support.

X.Org:
- Update X.Org server to 1.5.3.
- Add HAL support, X.Org now uses evdev/XInput to handle input devices: this provides a complete X.Org settings autodetection.
- Fasten X.Org startup.

Player:
- Upgrade MPlayer to r28089.
- Native RealVideo 10 decoder.

Video:
- Remove RadeonHD driver, use legacy ATI instead (should fix some X.Org ATI drivers issues).
- Upgrade Intel X.Org driver to 2.5.1

Drivers:
- Many UDEV related rules changes (should fix some legacy PATA devices driver loading issues).
- Fix LIRC Serial driver issues.
- Fixes some CD/DVD loading issues (bad fs was used on Video DVDs).

Networking:
- Restore UPnP feature.

Miscellaneous:
- Fix FBI Image Viewer loader.
- Various enhancements on info display menu.
- Many fixes to WebGUI.


Detailed Changelog (relative to 1.1 release):

System:
- X.Org 7.4 inclusion (default, change it with generator).
- Support for SMP and multi-cores.
- Update to Linux 2.6.27.4.
- Update BusyBox to 1.11.3.
- Update to SysLinux 3.72.
- Use of initramfs instead of initrd.

Toolchain:
- Update to GCC 4.3.2.
- Upgrade uClibc to 0.9.30-rc3.
- Upgrade glibc to 2.7.
- Use glibc as a default when building with X.Org.

Ports:
- Port to x86_64 architecture.
- Port to PowerPC 64bit architecture.
- MacIntel support.
- Optimizations for EasyGate platform.
- Optimizations for EeePC 700.

Player:
- Update MPlayer to r27662.
- Enable ASS support.
- Add MonkeyAudio decoder.
- Add GOOM audio visualization.
- Fix for CDDA playback.
- Add TV selection menu.
- Add de-interlace filter for DVDs and TV streams.
- Use of keypad for DVDNAV controls.
- Add support for extended PLS netstream entries.
- Enhanced DVD Navigation Menu support.
- Fix somes issues with encrypted DVDs playback.
- Use per stream type configuration profiles.

Video:
- Add widescreens and HDTV screens support.
- Add X11 video acceleration for most graphic cards (Intel, nVidia, ATI, S3, SiS, VIA ...).
- TV-Out is no longer available when booting with X.Org enabled.
- Some Intel VESA driver fixes.
- ATI VIDIX driver color fixes.
- Restore VIDIX support on PowerPC.

Drivers:
- X.Org hardware autodetection.
- Dozens of new WiFi, Ethernet, DVB ... drivers supported.
- All drivers are now modularized (no longer built-in): only useful ones are actually loaded.
- Add kernel drivers auto probe and load mechanisms.
- Fix many PATA devices issues.
- Add support for 16bit PCMCIA cards.
- LIRC 0.8.4

Networking:
- Upgrade to Samba 3.0.32 (better support for MS Vista shares).
- Add support for Plan9 network shares .
- Add NFS v3/4 support.
- Add PXE boot from Samba.
- Allow for defining static samba mounts

Installator:
- Introduction of configurator: post-install reconfiguration utility.
- Use of libparted instead of old fdisk for disk partionning.
- Enhanced install to USB process.
- Provide faster boot methods for install to HDD.

Generator:
- Add HDTV (X.org) related new options and configuration settings.
- Add GOOM audio visualization settings tab.
- Add NFS shares configuration tab.
- Add static Samba shares configuration tab.
- Automatic packages download at ISO image compilation.

Miscellaneous:
- Add AppleIR remote support.
- Add X10 RF MCE remote control support.
- Add ACPI multimedia buttons handling.
- Enhanced system information menu.
- Enhance VESA boot menu.
- Enhanced Web interface and better browser compliance.
- Add optional support for Video Disk Recorder (VDR).
- Use FeH image viewer instead of FBI.


Detailed Changelog (relative to 1.0 release) :

System:
- Update Linux to v2.6.21.3
- Upgrade BusyBox to v1.5.1
- Update uClibc to 0.9.29.
- Upgraded SysLinux bootloader to v3.20.
- Better CPU frequency scaling capabilities.

Toolchain:
- Added optional support for GNU glibc 2.5 in toolchain for debugging purpose.
- Upgrade to GCC 4.1.2

Player:
- Upgrade to MPlayer SVN v23418.
- Added support libavformat demuxer in addition to internal libmpdemux.
- New native VC-1/WMV3/WMV9 video decoder (Windows Media Video).
- New native On2 VP50 and VP62 decoder (Flash video).
- New native lossless audio decoders for WavPack, TTA, and Shorten.
- Support for VC1 in MPEG-TS and MPEG-PS files (like HD-DVD and BlueRay ones).
- Support for EVO demuxing (HD-DVD file format).
- Added support for VP7 binary codec.
- Added binary extra codec (through Generator) for WMA Pro files handling.
- Added binary codec for VC-1 codec as the native decoder is not (yet) able to decode all samples.
- Support for audio stream switching in MPEG-TS/PS, Matroska and streams supported by libavformat.
- Support for audio stream switching between streams with different codecs.
- New native RTSP input (handles MPEG-TS over RTP only) for generic RTSP servers (like FreeboxTV) which deprecates Live555 usage.
- H.264 decoding speed improvements.
- SSA/ASS subtitle renderer.
- Added support for ICEcast netstreams.
- Radio is now handled direclty through V4L2.
- Support for 3GP, AAC, VDR and DVR-MS files.
- Added a new Preferences menu, with many new options to control audio streams, subtitles, colors and tweak all video parameters.
- Removed libdts, libmpcdec, libogg, libvorbis and libtheora, as deprecated by new MPlayer internal decoders/demuxers.
- Allows loading external subtitle files.
- Allows setting playback speed.
- Allow selection of radio Genres, and store each genre in a subfolder for easier discovery.

Video:
- Fix with VESA on i945 cards.

Drivers:
- Added support for IVTV based cards (such as Hauppauge PVR 150/250/350/500).
- Support for WPA encryption on WiFi cards.
- Added support for Broadcom BCM43xx WiFi chipsets (like Apple AirPort).
- Added Ralink RT61 and RT73 chipsets support.
- Added support for wireless TI ACX111 chipsets.
- Added support for MadWiFi-NG driver.
- Added support for ZyDAS ZD12x1 wireless chipsets.
- Added support for PVR USB 2 TV card.
- Added support for Rio Karma USB mass storage devices.
- Added support for USB soundcards.
- Fixed ATI USB mouse directional keycodes.
- Added Medion (also Aldi) X-10 OEM'd remote.
- Added support for Logitech UltraX Media remote.
- Added support for some USB to serial interfaces.
- Introduced new libata support in kernel for IDE disks support.
- Do no more force disks to 32bits I/O (crashes with CompactFlash over IDE).
- Much better autodetection of USB DVB devices.
- Support for more radio cards.
- Rework of DVB firmware loader.

Networking:
- Support for IPv4 multicast (useful for RTSP streams).
- Added NdisWrapper support that allows using Win32 network (WiFi) drivers under Linux.
- Upgraded bftpd to version 1.8.4 and added new file /etc/ftp for FTP authentication.
- Updated Samba to 3.0.25, uses UTF-8 charset to mount shares and fixes some mount points handling issues.
- Allows Samba and NFS mounts to come up if the servers are brought up after geexbox boots up, by looping in the background.
- Added basic WebGUI implementation.

Generator:
- Support for NDISwrapper driver loading.
- Added new tab to add extra files to generated ISO image.
- New generator option to set WiFi channel number.
- Support for Windows Vista.

Miscellaneous:
- Removed deprecated non-working recorder/mencoder support.
- Added remote=/receiver= cheat codes in isolinux for easy change.
- Added menus in installator for selecting remote/receivers.
- Added support for various keyboard mapping (azerty/qwerty/qwertz)
- New makefile rules to build and play VMware virtual machines (make vmx; make vmx-play).
- Fixed QEMU/VirtualBox emulation.
- Add autoplay support for USB devices.
- Reworked internationalization files.
- Support for multiple languages in the same ISO image.
- Support for JFS file system.