A Preliminary XBMC Image is now Available for Wandboard, GK802

Yesterday, Stephan Rafin left a message on Wandboard mailing list saying he had released a preliminary (Linux) XBMC image that can run on Wandboard Quad development board. GPU and VPU acceleration work, but this is still work in progress, so if you want something that just works, this is not for you. But if you just want to give it a try, it should work on any hardware based on Freescale i.MX6, such as Wandboard Dual or GK802 mini PC, with some minor modifications.

If you’ve got a Wandboard Quad board, the installation is straightforward from a Linux machine:

1. Download the SD card image
2. Decompress it with xz or 7x:
   
   7z x wand.bin.xz

   1	7z x wand.bin.xz

3. Dump the resulting to a 2GB or greater microSD card:
   
   dd if=wand.bin of=/dev/sdx bs=4M

   1	dd if=wand.bin of=/dev/sdx bs=4M

   
   Where /dev/sdx is the sdcard device (e.g. /dev/sdc). You can check with lsblk command.

If you’ve got a machine running Windows only, you can use Win32DiskImager for step 3.

Now insert the microSD card in the EDM module’s SD card slot, and you can run XBMC. The board will get an IP address from DHCP, and you can access the board via SSH or the serial console with root/xbmcpoc as username and password.

There are some known issues.limitations:

• SPDIF and analog audio output are disabled for now, so that XBMC selects HDMI for audio output.

• Wifi is untested, and most probably not working

Stephan has made XMBC i.MX6 source code available on github.

I mentioned XBMC should also work on other i.MX6 platforms such as Wandboard Dual, or GK802 / Hi802 mini PC. I haven’t had time to try it, but in theory, you can either the three steps for Wandboard Quad, and update uboot and possibly the VPU firmware file (if not using i.MX 6Quad) for your hardware, or more simple, use an existing working (Linux) SD card for your device, and replace the rootfs with the content from rfs_wand.tgz. If your device is not based on the quad core version of i.MX6 SoC, you may also want to save the content of /lib/firmware/vpu/ to copy it back, after updating the rootfs.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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