Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Install Kodi on Raspberry Pi from Linux

A short article about how to install Kodi on a Raspberry Pi from Linux. I used to use the LibreELEC USB-SD Creator program, but it no longer works on Linux or Mac. The LibreELEC forum says that's due to too many dependencies on Qt. Oh well, it's not that hard to install without the spiffy GUI. There are probably other ways to get LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi, but this is what worked for me and is pretty straightforward


The Raspberry Pi I have is somewhat older now, maybe 4 years. For some reason, it gave up the ghost and wouldn't boot. I'd just get the LibreELEC start up screen, then after a while, kernel panic and nothing more. So I went to reinstall the OS, that's when I found out the GUI installer no longer works, even the one I had previously installed on my laptop. 


2 GB Raspberry Pi

I put it in this really nice box, just for Kodi:



I'm running Arch Linux, but these instructions should work on any Linux distro, and would work for a USB stick also:


  1. Download the latest image of LibreELEC from https://libreelec.tv/downloads/raspberry/

    Current image is LibreELEC-RPi4.arm-11.0.1.img.gz, but get whatever is the latest.

  2. Unzip the image: tar -xvzf LibreELEC-RPi4.arm-11.0.1.img.gz

  3. Insert an empty SD card into the computer. Find it with lsblk, it's probably /dev/sdb, but check to be sure for the next step.

  4. Burn the image to the SD card with (change the sdX as needed):

    sudo dd if=LibreELEC-RPi4.arm-11.0.1.img  of=/dev/sdX bs=4M

    Of course, use the actual filename of the image you downloaded and unzipped.

  5. Plug the SD card into the Kodi box and boot. That should be it.

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