Daniel Maclean

Some time ago I bought a new Macbook Pro and gave my old one to my wife. She loves it but it already had a good few years on it. It was a Macbook Pro 13 (Mid 2009) and was in need of a good home. At the time since I had my fancy new machine, so the normal maintenance cycle i'd do on a 2-3 year old system just floated by. My wife isn't a techy so naturally she put up with the bad battery life and the performance issues and just put it down to the "Crapbook" :-) Enough was enough! There being nothing technically wrong with the system, fans were operating as expected, memory wasn't dropping address's and even the HDD, a 500GB Hybrid Momentus XT was working great. The battery I actually replaced about 6 months ago because it was lasting all of 40 minutes, got it off ebay and was easier to install than the HDD upgrade. The only clear reason for bad performance was that after years of OS upgrades from the original version of OS X to the very latest, it was fina...

In my previous post I talked over the experience I had with the initial upgrade. It wasn't the smoothest of upgrades to be sure, however it's always a good upgrade when it works without my better half knowing anything has changed :-D I also mentioned some issues I was having, specifically the following: VGA Mode error on boot Audio set to Analog but coming through HDMI anyway Thumbnails on my shared drive don't seem to work with the new database, this is either because XBMC Eden index's them differently or that during the migration from the old to the new format, there was a conversion fault in the DB. However I haven't checked this out yet in more detail, could well be something entirely different. Well the good news two out of three of these issues are solved. Details below: VGA Mode error on boot So it turns out that a fix that I had to put in place with a previous version of OpenElec caused problems for the newer version. Specifically the splash scree...

Nothing more nerve racking than preparing for a major upgrade on production hardware. Sure I could have installed the new OpenElec to a external disk then tested from there, but I prefer to jump in with both feet! So how did it go? So I downloaded the latest image from the openelec.tv site (the 1.95.1 version which to all intensive purposes is 2.0) and extracted the contents as normal. I used my Windows laptop to do the work required below as apposed to my Macbook, simply because it was closer to me... yep I'm hardcore :-p I then copied the new KERNEL and SYSTEM images (along with the MD5 files) over to the SAMBA location //openelec/updates on my running ER1401 system. So far so good, system restart is then required to have OpenElec do the upgrade based on the files that I just transferred above. Apon reboot I got the familar messages than new images had been detected and that it was upgrading. It automatically reboots then starts with the new and updated OpenElec and XBMC...

So after the release of XBMC Eden , it was only a matter of time before OpenElec was also updated to include the latest version of XBMC. The guys over at openelec.tv have now also released the 1st beta version of OpenElec (1.95.1) or 2.0. Good times! As i'm running a system which is classed as "Generic" i.e. doesn't require a custom build, time will tell how the update/installation goes. What i've read so far is that not only is there significant changes on a OS level within OpenElec, but also there have been changes to the DB that XBMC maintains, so i'm not expecting the upgrade to go smooth, but here goes nothing! The guys over at OpenElec.tv have put together a wiki on how to upgrade , so give it a go yourself if you feel up to it. Will post my results after the upgrade has been completed. Image can be downloaded here . UPDATE: To see how it went check out this  post !