OpenELEC + XBMC on Raspberry Pi

[Michael]

Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center, or OpenELEC for short, is a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into a complete XBMC media center. OpenELEC is designed to make your system boot as fast as possible and the install is so easy that anyone can turn a blank PC into a media machine in less than 15 minutes.

OpenELEC build 10888 is available from http://www.numan1617.com/rpi/o.....ec/builds/

This is very much a work in progress.  For more info, please go here.

Original announcement here and here.

[The Architect]

You guys should really just make each of these distributions their own forum instead of just one topic post if you want to organize it better...

[milhouse]

You guys should really just make each of these distributions their own forum instead of just one topic post if you want to organize it better...

Agreed - create sub-forums for the major/popular distributions, plus one more for "Other Distributions".

[gruffman]

Anyone having a finished build (.img) for this? I have a slow cpu so don't want to build it my self.
And also, the latest version lacks information in the INTALL file.

/Kind Regards

[milhouse]

Anyone having a finished build (.img) for this? I have a slow cpu so don't want to build it my self.
And also, the latest version lacks information in the INTALL file.

/Kind Regards

Have a look in this (<=link) thread.

[ttgrules]

Just installed it on my 4gb card, and everything looks like it boots fine, but when the screen comes up it kills all usb devices and ethernet connections. I can't get it to do anything because the keyboards and remote access are down. Any ideas why?

[ttgrules]

Just tried it without the ethernet, and the keyboard seems to work fine for a while. It must be having a problem with my ethernet connection type. I have it running through one of those Signal over Power line things... However, it does keep bugging out after about 20 seconds of using the keyboard. Any reason why it might be doing this? I installed someone else's build... and they don't seem to have any problems with it.

[saiforigis]

Just tried it without the ethernet, and the keyboard seems to work fine for a while. It must be having a problem with my ethernet connection type. I have it running through one of those Signal over Power line things... However, it does keep bugging out after about 20 seconds of using the keyboard. Any reason why it might be doing this? I installed someone else's build... and they don't seem to have any problems with it.

I had the same problem and what fixed it was getting a different power supply. The cheap power supplies cannot deliver enough power.

[ttgrules]

Thanks! That turned out to be the problem... I feel so stupid for that mistake... I decided to build it myself anyways. I'll post an img file when I'm done.

[Davespice]

Just want to say that Michael and co deserve a lot of praise here. I see they're getting builds out almost daily.
Jolly good work chaps.

[greglogan]

Any chance someone could post a complete image for the new build?? I'm having issues with 10783 locking up. My card reader doesn't seem to want to work with any linux system so I'm limited to using windows atm

Greg.

[geeday]

I just found this:
http://www.root9.net/2012/05/raspberry- ... -xbmc.html
will try it later.

[Davespice]

I have a couple of questions if it's okay...

I've managed to SSH into the box using PuTTY and openelec / openelec.
Is it possible to edit the /etc/sshd_config file? I just want to make it also listen on another port number.
I tried to edit the file using vim but was prevented from saving by read only permissions on the file.

Is it possible to set up winbind to run on it too? Not essential but a nice to have.
Cheers!

Dave

[geeday]

did you sudo your edit command???

sudo nano /etc/the file

[Davespice]

did you sudo your edit command???

sudo nano /etc/the file

Sudo and nano are both not available on the command line on this, very cut down, distribution of linux. Vim is though and if you use su root and enter openelec again as the password it drops you into root. But the read only permission still prevents my save despite this.

[milhouse]

I've managed to SSH into the box using PuTTY and openelec / openelec.
Is it possible to edit the /etc/sshd_config file? I just want to make it also listen on another port number.
I tried to edit the file using vim but was prevented from saving by read only permissions on the file.

It's not that the /etc/sshd_config file has read-only permission, it's that the entire root (/) filesystem is mounted read-only as it's a "loopback" filesystem - the root filesystem in OpenELEC is actually the contents of the single SYSTEM image file you put on your SD card. Long story short, you can't change anything in the root filesystem unless you roll your own SYSTEM file.

Some services in OpenELEC do have configuration files that may optionally exist in ~/.config (which is a read-write area of your /storage partition) - if you create a config file here (eg. samba.conf) it will take precedence over any equivalent file in /etc. However, sshd isn't one of these.

What you might be able to do is create (as user root) a file called "autostart.sh" in ~/.config and also store your own sshd_config in ~/.config.

It's a hack but it should work, try something like the following in ~/.config/autostart.sh:

Code: Select all

killall sshd
/usr/sbin/sshd -f ~/.config/sshd_config

When OpenELEC boots, it will start sshd normally using it's default settings (/etc/sshd_config) but just as OpenELEC brings up XBMC it will run "sh autostart.sh" (assuming it exists) and using the above lines can be used to kill the running sshd server and restart it with your own configuration and any extra ports/options you require.

[Mr_Pi]

Can anyone help me out? I don't know how to put xbmc onto the Pi. I have one sd card with the OS loaded. Do I install xbmc onto this or do I need a separate sd card for xbmc. Using windows do I need to put the image over via flashing?

[RTM]

I just installed the system on my RPI, and so far it is working pretty decent.

There is still quite a few bugs, but i guess this is to be expected, given the age of the system.
A question though, do you want us to report bugs? if so, where do we report them?

@Mr_Pi:
I used the instructions from this site: http://openelec.tv/news/item/242-openel ... -pi-part-2, your sd card might be named something like /dev/mmcblk0, rather than /dev/sdb mentioned in the manual, depending on the connection of your card reader
You will need to use a linux system(or an advanced partitioning tool, since Windows can not create ext4 formatted partitions) to partition the SD card accordingly, i used the ubuntu installation cd as a live disk.

EDIT: also you should beware not to delete the contents of the other disks in your computer, so it might not be /dev/sdb even if it is not /dev/mmcblk0.

[stevepdp]

A question though, do you want us to report bugs? if so, where do we report them

OpenELEC operate a bug tracker at Github.

Remember to mention that you're running OpenELEC on a Pi and which build you're using etc

[LastSilmaril]

did you sudo your edit command???

sudo nano /etc/the file

Sudo and nano are both not available on the command line on this, very cut down, distribution of linux.

Actually, though vim actually wasn't the nightmare I thought it would be (well, not after the first 5 mins of googling anyway), nano is now available as an addon that you could install via the xbmc ui under programs. Once it's installed, rebooting OpenELEC will allow you to use it.

So I'd like to know how to mount the root as read-write. it would be something like mount -o rw,remount but i don't know what the parameters would be after that. we know what the mountpoint is (root) but not 'where it's coming from'. If you specify /dev/mmcblk0p1 and some folder as the mountpoint, all that does is expose the 128MB system partition (with the bootloader, config files and SYSTEM img). But what we want, to my knowledge, to make the contents of the SYSTEM img writable. Hmm. What if after doing the above we did
mount -o rw /flash/SYSTEM /system
or something? Ugh. I don't remember this stuff well enough

[milhouse]

Actually, though vim actually wasn't the nightmare I thought it would be (well, not after the first 5 mins of googling anyway), nano is now available as an addon that you could install via the xbmc ui under programs. Once it's installed, rebooting OpenELEC will allow you to use it.

vi is installed by default - worth learning how to use vi as it's usually available on every distribution as standard.

So I'd like to know how to mount the root as read-write.

You can't - see my previous post above.

[LastSilmaril]

Actually, though vim actually wasn't the nightmare I thought it would be (well, not after the first 5 mins of googling anyway), nano is now available as an addon that you could install via the xbmc ui under programs. Once it's installed, rebooting OpenELEC will allow you to use it.

vi is installed by default - worth learning how to use vi as it's usually available on every distribution as standard.

Right, I knew about vi, hence the part about the googling.

So I'd like to know how to mount the root as read-write.

You can't - see my previous post above.

Aha, so over there you say

Long story short, you can't change anything in the root filesystem unless you roll your own SYSTEM file.

So do you know what switch in OpenELEC configuration allows for that?

[milhouse]

So do you know what switch in OpenELEC configuration allows for that?

There are no switches that would allow you to build a rewritable version of SYSTEM - once it's created by the build system its content remains fixed.

What I mean by rolling your own SYSTEM is that you could patch sshd_config in the build directory (or patch /etc/init.d/51_sshd so that it looks in ~/.config for an alternative sshd_config and uses it if present) - and then keep reapplying your patch every time you update from git - before building your own SYSTEM which would then contain your modified sshd_config.

Though to be honest it would be much easier to go with the hack I suggested above rather than fork OpenELEC, which is essentially what you would be doing by modifying the OpenELEC source.

[Davespice]

Hi guys;
The latest build I have used is the one from the 15th of May. It is actually really impressive and shows off the Pi’s pixel pushing power really well. It did slow down a bit when you use the menus overlaid on top of the playback. But otherwise really good. I used it to stream some episodes over the LAN from a Samba/Windows Server 2003 box.

One thing I have noticed though is that I do not always get sound.
AAC sound seems to always work, but DTS and Dolby 5.1 both don’t. I’m not sure if that is to do with codec royalties or something? If anyone could enlighten me that would be great.

Cheers!

[nadnerb]

One thing I have noticed though is that I do not always get sound.
AAC sound seems to always work, but DTS and Dolby 5.1 both don’t. I’m not sure if that is to do with codec royalties or something? If anyone could enlighten me that would be great.

Cheers!

Check the audio settings in XBMC.
You're probably passing the DTS and 5.1 audio through HDMI to an incompatible device.
Change the setting and the Pi will decode the audio stream first.