I’ve been using my Xbox 1 chipped with XBMC for over 4 years now, and it has served me some good times. But as the movie quality keeps improving, or increasing in size, the Xbox doesn’t have what it take’s anymore. For example, viewing a movie in 1080p quality is simply not possible. Mostly because the file format MKV is not supported, or weakly supported.

A friend of me was talking about his new HTPC running on Snow Leopard with XMBC and it got me thinking, running Snow Leopard om my TV sounds good to me anyway. And being able to finally view Full-HD movies on my TV (witch it has never done before) is something i really want, I’m done watching crappy DivX’s.

Of course it never comes cheap, for a reasonable priced hardware configuration you come somewhere near 400 – 450 euro’s. And if I want a nice casing that fits next to my amplifier it costs me even more. The same goes for ’sound reduced’ hardware. So I think I’m just going with the average hardware and put this in a basic casing, and hide it behind my couch Maybe put some sound reducing stuff in the casing to reduce the annoying fan noise.

- Edit, Turns out HTPC casings are not that expensive after all. Found one for 60 euro’s, Looks like it’s going to be next to my amplifier afterall

The configuration I have so far is priced around 400 euro’s. I will start the project once I have the hardware obviously.

Today I received the packages, even got better memory for free because the one I ordered appeared not to be in stock. I installed the hardware in the casing, all went smooth. Now im busy installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on the machine, but can’t seem to get it working.. i’ve tried the iATKOS v7, SnowOSX 3.6 but they didn’t work for me. SnowOSX did but sound was not working and the bios keeps resetting on reboot.

The fix seems to be in the Snow Leopard 10.6.1-10.6.2 SSE2/SSE3 Intel AMD by Hazard package, but I downloaded the wrong version. Downloading the right version now but its going kind of slow. I’ll keep you updated on progress.

These are the options I used up till now:
- VoodooHDA
- NvENABLER
- Chameleon RC4
- ElliotForceLegacyRTC
- OpenHaltRestart

Turned out I have to patch the Snow Leopard 10.6.1-10.6.2 SSE2/SSE3 Intel AMD by Hazard dvd first with an update, I wasted 2 good DVD’s on that! And my last ones, I ordered 100 DVD’s on cdrwinkel.com just in case. Now going to the store to get 1 or 2 DVD’s to burn the right image.

A few day’s ago I completed this project, but obviously forgot to update this post because I watched some 1080p movies That means the project was successful, but it was a pain in the *ss. Installing OS X on a normal PC is not that easy you might read somewhere. For some reason I got everything working except for my videocard. Strangly, a friend had the exact same card, but from a nother manufacturer and that one did work. Strange. We traded cards and now the HTPC is running Mac OS X 10.6.2 like a charm! Got XBMC installed, and placed the box in my livingroom. It’s looking kinda cool there! Btw, the DVD I used was “SnowOSX 3.6“. Some pics soon.

-Edit, some pics below! The HTPC is the one on the left.

I don’t often write something to my blog, mostly because I can’t find the time or the subject to write about, or the subject I can disclose to the public that is ^^. Anyway, I want to bust two bugs in one slap. That is writing something that is helpful to anyone interested and also for an archive of my projects. Often I start a personal project, mostly it doesn’t get completed because i get pulled of due other projects that actually bring food on the table. But this time I’m approaching it from another direction. Making my projects public for anyone to read. This keeps me motivated to complete the project and hopefully get some nice feedback from it.

My first project I’m posting is installing Xen 3.0.3 on a fresh server. Recently I’ve sold my webhosting company because I did not have the time, nor the long-term motivation for it. I’ve sold the company including the servers. But I managed to keep one server for myself and friends. This server is going to be used in this project so that I and my friends can have their own Virtual Machine.

Note that this is entirely new for me, and I don’t have any experience on virtualization what so ever, if you can provide me with any helpful feedback it will be appreciated

For some reason I have chosen to use Xen, why I don’t know exactly, other then its open source and according to the manual very easy to setup. I did look into other possibilities but it seems Xen is the most complete, and free software for virtualization. Also build by some of the most experienced companies out there, that gives me a big boost in confidence on support, communities etc.

I will update this post frequently on the status of the installation, how I did it and a complete log of installation commands that worked for my server. So if this post intrigues you, bookmark it!

Project is finished. This website is now running on a Virtual Machine!

I’ve chosen to use CentOS 5 because I’m familiar to this operating system and it’s easy to use. I’m using this OS for my dom0 setup, and also for the clients (domU).

Just got back from the datacenter, picked up the server I’m going to use for this project! After 2 years non-stop serving websites I thought let me clean the inside from dust, but surprisingly there was none.. at all..

Attempted to install a clean CentOS 5 installation with the netinstall ISO, appears my dvd-rom is broken, replaced it with new one; The DVD itself is not OK, that was my last one.. Need to get to the store later. me 0 – 1 preparation.

Today I configured the RAID, I’ve chosen for RAID10 with 4x 250GB hdd’s. This gives me 500GB disk space and a mirror for safety Building the array obviously took a long time. Got new CD’s, burned the netinstall ISO and booted the installation thought a HTTP mirror, works like a charm. But there seems to be an error with the GRUB loader after installation, I tried to fix it for a couple of hours, google-d my ass off but can’t seem to fix the problem. Called in the help of a friend who happens to be an expert in my eyes. Waiting for him to arrive and hopefully he knows how to fix it.

Problem turned out to be the RAID10 configuration, somehow CentOS doesn’t ‘take’ it. Also Ubuntu doesn’t like the RAID 10 configuration. Now i configured 2 times RAID1 for all 4 disks. Still gives me 500GB of storage, and mirrors. Installed CentOS 5.4 thought netinstall, now installing Xen.

– Well, installing Xen was pretty much easy. These are the steps i made:

I want to store all my VM’s on a big disk, for me that was the root disk. I created a folder on /data/vms/ for my virtual machines. After that I simply ran:

yum install kernel-xen xen

This installs Xen and the xen kernel. And it automatically adds the kernel to the Grub boot menu. You do have to make sure it’s set as default so it will boot that kernel on startup.

nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

Change the value of default to 0 (make sure the xen kernel is above other’s).

Reboot your system,

shutdown -r now

And it should boot from the new Xen kernel now!

To check if it is, run

[root@server ~]# uname -r
2.6.18-164.15.1.el5xen
[root@server ~]#

And we are done. We can setup virtual machines (domains) now.

That was pretty simple too, Xen comes with a tool that prompts you with the questions. You only have to enter the name and path basically for Xen to setup the VM. Type:

virt-install --prompt

When Xen ask’s for the Install URL you can use the images for your prevered flavor of linux, or what ever OS you want to install. I used CentOS for my first VM.

After installation, if you want to automatically boot your VM type on the domain-0:

ln -s /etc/xen/<vmname> /etc/xen/auto

For a list of Xen commands you can visit: http://xen-tools.org/software/xen-shell/commands.html

Well, it was a fast project for sure, all went easy as h*ll, except for the RAID10 issue. But everything is running smoothly and I have 3 VM’s running on the machine. Going to set it up in the datacenter again somewhere next week, And migrating this website to it! Thank you for reading, commenting is allowed And since it’s Queens Day here in Holland, im out partying now, bye!

Visit the demo for download, and please comment if you like it and use it, it’s kinda fun to see it in a working project.

Update: On request i added MySQL database support, the script now saves the blocks into DB and pulls them out

Update2: I get allot of good responses but also many feature requests, so i decided to ask you script users what you would like to see as a new feature in the script, and i will try build it all in. Please type a comment on what you would like to see build in

Update3: 17 Nov 2010, Hi all, there has not been much activity lately on this script, but I decided to create a complete new version. Would you like it to have jquery support too? Im thinking about it.. I also made a public repository on github, you can visit and help coding here:

https://github.com/mdahiemstra/iGoogle-Drag-Drop-portal