I’m kind of fond of using XBMCbuntu on my media-serving PC hooked up to the Samsung flatscreen TV in the lounge, though I have had two epic failures thus far – which I can’t entirely blame on the operating system because I’m running some pretty ancient hardware with wonky drives. Anyway, the point is that I’ve had to reinstall from my install CD a couple of times, which then obviously puts me on a slightly out of date version at the end of the install process.

So the question is, how do I upgrade XBMCbuntu when doing a clean install is not really an acceptable option?

Well actually it is pretty easy – just use Ubuntu’s standard PPA and apt-get system.

First, you need a terminal to work in – ALT+CTRL+F1 will do the trick, though you can also select the Exit option from the XBMC power button menu, change the system selection from XBMC to XBMCbuntu, and log in with your username and password that you set when you first installed the operating system (if you can’t remember, then it is useful to note that XBMC’s root user account is ‘xbmc’ with a blank password).

Now, add the PPA using (You can probably skip this if you originally installed XBMC via an XBMCbuntu ISO):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa

Finally, you simply run the usual apt-get update command (focused of course) to actually update XBMC:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install xbmc xbmc.bin

So no surprises there and you should be all done.

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(Just a note though, if you are moving up to v13, then it is suggested that you rather to a clean install, thanks to the myriad of rather substantial changes made audio wise due to a redesigned engine. If you don’t want to do this, then try removing all user configuration files for alsa or any alsa drivers)

Related Link: http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=XBMCbuntu