How to Install Boxee on Ubuntu Natty 11.04

Boxee is a home theater social media center which can be bought as a box for your TV or downloaded and installed on a spare computer. This computer can be an old Mac, Windows, or Linux computer. Unfortunately, people have been having trouble installing the latest Boxee on the latest Ubuntu operating system. This quick tutorial will show you how to install Boxee on Ubuntu 11.04.

First of all, I'd like to thank Maxo for the post on his blog on how to install Boxee on Ubuntu 11.04. It was a real time saver for me and hopefully it will be for you.

If you don't want to follow the tutorial, you can simply download the already modified .deb package (all links below). Open it up with Ubuntu Software Center and install while safely ignoring all warnings.

Modified .DEB download link: http://hotfile.com/dl/122408449/661e9a9/boxee-modified.deb.html

Feeling a bit adventurous? Don't trust that .deb file I uploaded? No worries! Here's how to create that .deb file manually.

First, download Boxee from the official website.

Next, open up a terminal and type in the directory of the downloaded .deb file. So if boxee-0.9.22.13692.i486.modfied.deb is in your Downloads folder, type this into the terminal:

cd ~/Downloads or cd /home/your_username/Downloads

Then paste these lines individually into a terminal:

dpkg-deb -x boxee-0.9.22.13692.i486.modified.deb boxee

dpkg-deb --control boxee-0.9.22.13692.i486.modified.deb

boxee/DEBIAN

That will now extract the .deb file so we can see and modify its contents. Now keep that terminal open, we'll need it shortly. There's one pesky little file that's messing up the install that says that one of the dependencies for Boxee is libxmlrpc-c3. However, this dependency is no longer needed and can't be installed. So we have to edit the file that lists the dependencies of Boxee, and that file is suitably named, control.

To edit this file in Gedit, enter:

gedit boxee/DEBIAN

In the window that pops up, find the term "libxmlrpc-c3" (hit CTRL+F) and add "-0" to the end of it. Save the changes and close Gedit.

Now the .deb file needs to be zipped back up into one neat file. Again, in the same terminal as before, enter:

dpkg -b boxee boxee-modified.deb

This will create a new .deb file called boxee-modified. You can call it whatever you want, it doesn't really matter. Once it's done, install Boxee on Ubuntu 11.04 by opening up that newly created .deb.