Round 1: compiling xbmc

Although downloading and compiling Freeciv was an invaluable learning experience, there were many problems that were encountered doing the same with xbmc.

The first thing that I that I did wrong was download the source code from the wrong site, which was the old sourceforge repository.  I had downloaded all the files and was getting ready to compile and make the project, when I went to the xbmc wiki and saw that all the most recent releases were now being stored at github.

So I deleted that folder (rm -rf "folderName" deletes the folder and its contents) and started from the beginning using the new repository with the subversion command "svn co https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc".
And here is where my next problem made itself apparent.  I had walked away from my laptop while downloading, and when I came back the terminal curser was blinking.  Thinking everything had downloaded fine I went ahead and tried to compile, but after many minutes of compiling received error messages saying I was missing about half of the code.  Looking back through my terminal logs I saw that I had indeed lost the secure connection halfway through the download.

Not to be a person easily daunted, I pressed on and tried again.  This time, after almost all of the code had been downloaded, I ran out of disk space on my virtual machine.  A rookie mistake!  When creating it many months ago, I had only allotted it 10 gigs of space on my hard drive.  So now I am in the process of imaging a new virtual machine and starting over.  Round 1 goes to xbmc.