XBMC, the opensource multimedia, exists as a live OS version. We will see how to create a bootable USB pendrive or SDHC memory card, with a complete multimedia solution.

XBMC provides a wide range of multimedia features, with a beautiful interface. It can playback video and audio files, stream online radios, playback your DVDs or, as seen in a previous article, it can also used as a UPnP video streaming client.

It may be interesting to have your entire music and video collection available on an external drive, bootable on any computer.

You can download XBMC Live from sourceforge. You will have a 329MB zip archive with XBMC_Live-8.10.iso inside. You can burn a DVD from the .iso file, using an external dvd drive if you have a netbook, or on another computer.

Steps to create an XBMC pendrive

• Boot a computer from the DVD with XBMC. You will arrive at a splash screen with four options. Press 0 to start the installation program.

• The disk creator will ask you to plug your USB flash disk or memory card. You need at least a 2GB drive for XBMC. In this example, I used a 4GB SDHC card.

• You will get to the most critical step now: you have to choose which disk to use. Be very careful at this point, if you choose the wrong drive you will loose all of your data from it, as it will be formated! My EeeBox’s internal hard drive was listed as sda, and my SDHC card as sdb, labelled as Removable.

• To finalize your system, select the remaining free space as the permanent system storage.

You can boot your multimedia drive from any computer now. If you are using a netbook like the Eeepc, or the Aspire One, you have to choose the third option at the splash menu, in order to use XBMC with your intel graphic card.