Xbian is the last of the XBMC specific distros for the Raspberry Pi I wanted to look at. XBian, like OpenElec, is updated fairly regularly - which is good. Beyond that, XBian sounds like a cross between Raspbmc and OpenElec. A good description of Xbian is OpenElec, but not trimmed down to the bone. They leave more Linux in place should you need to perform maintenance outside of what they consider to be typical.
XBian - 1.0 release candidate 3
When I first tried Xbian the latest version was 1.0 RC2. This version was not compatible with the Raspberry Pi model B+. When you booted Xbian all USB ports were dead, so the mouse and keyboard would not work. This is where I first learned about the manual firmware update I talked about in a recent post. But only a few days after running into that problem, RC3 was released which fixed this problem.
Using RC3 I am able to go further, but I hit another wall. Once XBMC has loaded I noticed my WiFi adapter is not working so I have no network access. What is worse, I am not able to connect my Pi up to a wired ethernet jack right now. And without network access, XBian is useless to me. As I previously started in my review of OpenElec, I am going to go with a headless tvheadend server for now and I will purchase a second Pi to use as a HTPC. At that point I will revisit Xbian. Hopefully by then they will either fix the network issue, or I will have access to a wired network port then to be able to test with.
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