[Thomas Korimort]

@dandsmith: as far as i know Raspbian still is based on Wheezy. It seems there are some custom distributions out there. Thus maybe it is not so much effort to build such distro. Me, for myself, i am interested also in how one has to manage firmware and bootloader together to setup a working distribution. Interestingly, since RPi2 is based on armv7 standard, the standard precompiled binaries and netinstall images from Debian 8.0 for armhf architectures can be used. Still such image has to be knitted together with the firmware, maybe even the kernel needs to be reconfigured and recompiled, at least some modules seem to be necessary to be added. As far as i know the firmware needs some small partition on the SD card and provides the /boot directory which contains the kernel and firmware. Also since the RPi2 does not have a BIOS all the driver functionality needs to be provided on a software level. Only the hardware needs to extract the bootsector from the SD card thus knowing only how to read the first few sectors of the SD card into the CPU. For the netinstall image you make another partition on the SD card, where you copy the image. That is how i imagine it is working. But still this seems to be natively only supported by Linux tootls. Win32DiskImager for Windows is hard to use because it make not only exact sector copies from the boot sectors but also from the whole SD card. For my SD card of 128 GB, this takes 2 hours on my i7 16GB windows desktop to save the contents of my 4-6 GB installation on my SD card. But i think it would be sufficient to read the contents of the filesystem instead of copying sector by sector.

[Claudio.Sjo]

Thomas,
I give you my 5 cent of experience with RPi and RPi2.
I've got a RPi first, and started using it wit Openelec, it works fine, but I had to do some homework to make it rip CD.
I tried Volumio, and went back to OE, my next step will be to put it into an amplifier and use it as music player, as RPi is not powerful enough to be used as desktop.
I got a RPi2 then, and wanted to try as desktop, together with other stuffs that I did already own, like a monitor, a keyboard, USB HD.
Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu don't work, as they have no drivers for exploiting graphic acceleration.
Hacked Ubuntu L14.04 does the job, I can use it quite well, but still the HW acceleration for graphic doesn't allow vlc, mplayer to work.
When trying Kodi, I get black screen and need to ssh from remote and kill kodi to get back on the desktop.
If you want a solution for kodi and extra services, then you can use osmc, here you have a Openelec-like distribution on the top of a real distro
that allows to setup extra services.
Openelec doesn't, as it's based on the idea that you cannot change anything outside kodi.
If I have little time today, I'm going to test again https://osmc.tv/ as I'm curious to see if I can use it as a fileserver.

[dandnsmith]

@dandsmith:... still this seems to be natively only supported by Linux tootls. Win32DiskImager for Windows is hard to use because it make not only exact sector copies from the boot sectors but also from the whole SD card. For my SD card of 128 GB, this takes 2 hours on my i7 16GB windows desktop to save the contents of my 4-6 GB installation on my SD card. But i think it would be sufficient to read the contents of the filesystem instead of copying sector by sector.

Sounds like you have you own special problems.
I use USBit for some of my Windows work, rather than Win32DiskImager, as I had some problems with the latter.
It really helps to have a Linux environment, for the tools, and rsync and parted can help with the setting up of an SDCard (avoiding the whole sector by sector thing)

[swetoast]

Yepp reinventing the wheel is always an option not just the best option

Welcome to Raspbian GNU/Linux 8.0 (jessie) (Kernel Version: 3.18.0-trunk-rpi).

funny my rasbian says jessie ^^ as for that printer server works just fine under osmc even made a little script that pretty much automates the installation process and gives you google cloud print and airprint support from the cups server thus elimanating the use for drivers under windows all thats needed is google cloud print installed

https://gitlab.com/swe_toast/Printerserver

seems pretty easy so i dont really get why debian is needed when osmc has everything thats needed and if osmc isnt your cup of tea go xbian just add the repo to raspbian and go from there really dont see why you have to compile kodi seems like a waste of time and effort

[Thomas Korimort]

@Claudio: Thanks for sharing your experiences. The problem with drivers can be solved by doing a firmware update. I got a special image from the internet (Google for "Debian 8.0 Jessie RaspBerry pi 2). Then also you have to do a firmware update and a general update for the packages (apt update). The firmware update (search "Hexxeh rpi-update script" in Google) will install all the files lib-files, includes and binaries from the firmware in the directory /opt/vc, but it does not make the links to the general library path. You would have to set the library path by ldconfig to /opt/vc/lib (use "man ldconfig" to see how ldconfig works). Also if you want to compile something based on the libraries of firmware you have to provide the path /opt/vc/include and some subdirectories and for using the firmware binaries you also need to point the PATH variable to it or call by explicit path. Also on my image i had to add a line to /etc/modules to load the sound module for the RPi2 mod-bcm2835 (or mod_bcm2835). Then you can use it with ALSA sound driver of Linux. in the firmware of RPi2 is included libraries for openGL and GLES. For using xbmc 12 you also have to set the framebuffer depth to 32 bit in the config.txt file of the firmware in /boot/firmware/config.txt. This way i could arrive at basically the same experience like you, only after this by using the command "xinit xbmc -fs --standalone" the x system starts and immediatley return successfully back to the console. xbmc does not complain anymore about missing OpenGL hardware support and also not anymore about increasing the color depth to 24 bit, but still it does not even boot the xbmc desktop. If i use another instruction from the internet to install xbmc under Debian natively and then copy the kodi files from OpenElec by mounting the image of the distro, i get a working Kodi desktop but i cannot listen to any music or watch video, only thing that is working in such case is viewing of jpegs and other pictures.

[Thomas Korimort]

@dandnsmith: I looked into the description of USBit. It does not say which kind of copy procedure it uses to make Disk imges. Maybe for the programmers of such software it is more easy to copy sector by sector than to take care of boot sectors partitions of media file systems and so on. Maybe the "dd" tool of Linux is better and for making one backup of the SD card one could boot Linux from a Live-CD on a Windows desktop to use Linux "dd".

@swetoast: you are right in your arguments. Compiling Kodi 15 oneself from the Git repository might be not necessary or maybe does not even work so easily. Printer Server i could set upt myself in some hours of research into the internet and Linux howTos and docs (to admit i looked more in google than in man and howto that come with the distro). By looking in Google you often find only outdated information and threads about certain topics of interest. I also have to learn currently to adopt a scientifically more accurate style of researching into the internet looking more on the dates of posts and their connections. I installed CUPS which supports natively IPP internet pritning protocol, which is also supported by Android apps and also Windows. However, under Windows i access my printer by Samba, which forwards its printing queues contents to CUPS. In order to get that working i had to activate CUPS for Samba, tell Samba to force CUPS to accept raw data and finally i conigured, that Samba should allow clinet side drivers for the printer. Thus i can use the printer under Windows with native Windows drivers. It took me quite some hours to find out how to do this and a lot of problems came, but now i can say happily that i know about Samba, different internet protocols, network architecture, printer driver system of Linux, pritner queue aso. and this is working nicely now. Thus i am learning a lot. That is not the same like reinventing the wheel. If i want to be able to administrate a Linux system, this knowledge is needed and i have to learn it somehow. For some people learning without too much success in the priority tasks might be unacceptable, but i try to see it as fun and enjoyment to experiment with my RPi2 and Debian Linux 8.0. I am not counting the hours i spend with it according to how much someone would pay me for working an hour for this person instead.

[Claudio.Sjo]

Thomas,
did you give a chance to osmc?

[Thomas Korimort]

@Claudio. Not yet. It seems to be also a kind of restricted Linux tailored to some few particular purposes. Native Debian was an is the distribution for scientists and people serious about Linux and Unix systems. I also bought a 128 GB sd card for my RPi2, because i intended to run on it different servers and to use it also for Latex and Maxima and remote desktop with X11 forwarding to Xming server from ssh via Windows. My intent is also to understand how a standard netinstalll image from Debian 8.0 can be combined with a firmware installer and proper kernel configuration to set up a complete and working system. Still another (not so minor) issue is getting xbmc/Kodi running for using my Rpi2 also as Media Center server and client. I would consider it a great success being able to set up all those things in proper way on my Debian 8.0 Jessie on Rpi2. :-)

[nickr]

How many times do you have to be told? OSMC is based on debian jessie. You have full access to the full debian ecosystem, including any apt repository you want to use, including the usual jessie ones. You can set u anything you like as well as kodi.

[popcornmix]

@Claudio. Not yet. It seems to be also a kind of restricted Linux tailored to some few particular purposes.

In what way is it restricted? I believe it has the complete Debian Jessie repository and anything can be apt-get installed.
The thing is, OSMC devs have spent thousands of man hours getting a distribution set up that runs kodi well.
If you want wifi, bluetooth, remotes or DVB kernel drivers they are all there for you.
If you want PVR and other binary add-ons they have been built for you.
They have set up all the systemd scipts to make sure your network and filesystems are ready when kodi boots.
They have set up the permissions and udev rules so your disks are mounted and your wifi dongles are detected when hotplugged.

Jessie is not yet officially supported by raspberry pi. There will be official Jessie images in the near future and we will add a version of Kodi that works with Jessie to the raspberrypi repo at some point. If you stick with Wheezy then you can apt-get install kodi and you will have a version that works okay. But it's never going to be as smooth as using OSMC which has just had so much more work put into it.

So, if you just it to work without difficulties, go for OSMC.
If you want the learning experience then feel free to go ahead. Ideally document what you do as it may help others who want to do a similar thing.

[Thomas Korimort]

@popcornmix: thanks for your comment. I am now positive towards using OSMC. Still i also welcome possibilities to learn about Linux and not only use the most comfortable solution. I consider your information about OSMC adaption quality to RPi2 very useful. I know you guys do a good job. I myself was also striving to become an open source community contributor but until now i never managed to be. For my part seeing packages like xbmc 12 in Jessie to fail on RPi2 is not a proof that you developers are failing but i consider it as a challenge in law issues related to your activities and the activities of open source community in general. So you are telling me that it is true, that xbmc package of Debian 8.0 Jessie is not working on RPi2 or can it be made working by installing extra packages, caring the X server or whatever? Is it possible to compile Kodi 15 for a working firmware RPi2/debian 8.0 Jessie combination?

[popcornmix]

So you are telling me that it is true, that xbmc package of Debian 8.0 Jessie is not working on RPi2 or can it be made working by installing extra packages, caring the X server or whatever? Is it possible to compile Kodi 15 for a working firmware RPi2/debian 8.0 Jessie combination?

Correct. Upstream debian does not build xbmc/kodi for raspberry pi. It builds a generic arm version that won't run on raspberry pi.
Under wheezy there is an additional raspberrypi repo ("deb-src http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ wheezy main") which includes a version of kodi that does work on raspberry pi.
As we haven't updated this repo for jessie, then you don't get this. You may be able to add that repo to your jessie build, but I can't confirm if that will work.

I'm sure it's possible to compile kodi 15 for jessie. It's possible the instructions around for building for wheezy will just work, or it may need minor tweaking. There is certainly nothing that should be a bug obstacle.

There is a deb file for Kodi 15 here. I don't know if it works with jessie but it may be worth trying.

[Thomas Korimort]

@popcornmix: I have had a short look over my printouts that i used when i wanted to compile Kodi 15 Beta for my RPi2 on Debian Jessie. The link you pointed me to seems to use the settings of one of those printouts.

First, there is in Git repository of xbmc README.linux, which contains the library dependencies, that one obviously needs to take care when trying to compile Kodi by himself. It seems as if it is expected to care about this dependencies by hand checking every library. I did that for my Debian Jessie 8.0 installation and at least all the libraries were available, some of them at a more recent version than required by Kodi 15 (according to the README). Then there is another README.raspberrypi which contains 2 pages of seemingly outdated info on compiling Kodi on RaspBerry Pi and it seems to be an instruction for either building a complete image like OpenELEC or cros-compiling it, but it does not contain any information for natively compiling it. Maybe that is because the original RaspBerry Pi Model was not as powerful as RaspBerry Pi 2 and therefore no one suspected that anyone could try to compile Kodi on that platform natively. THus i would sy that there is deman for a nice README on how to compile Kodi on RPi2.

Another source that related more to compile Kodi 15 for RPi2 is the report of fraz0815 available at " https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt...6&t=101664 ". But that also relates to RaspBian, which also seems to have problems with Kodi native package. I think i followed his instructions to natively compile, but i got a complaint about gpg-error library not having main entrance point or something like that. As fraz0815 pointed me in this thread that this is because of missing CXXFLAGS and CFLAGS, i don't think it is like that, because i followed his instructions to compile. Thus i was not able to build Kodi. fraz0815 also pointed me in this current thread to the fact that the log-file (whichever he was relating to) gives more detailed information. Thus it seems he was able to solve the problem. I tried to bracket out the corrsponding parts of the configure script, but that left me with an unending series of complaints about missing libraries. Thus i was concluding that i have broken the configure script by my modifications, which led me in further consequence to reinstall my SD card to get a gain a nice and clean install not messed up with broken Kodi builds.

Dear popcornmix, i thinnk it would be necessary to talk to someone who knows the internal of the Kodi branches destined for the public and who can build up some pages of instruction on how to compile natively Kodi on a RaspBerry Pi 2 with Debian (8.0) based Linux installation. As it seems to me even for Raspbian there is no instruction to compile Kodi for RPi2.

[popcornmix]

It appears zog in the linked thread built Kodi for jessie. You are probably better off asking questions there.

I build kodi as a cross-compile from Ubuntu, using th pretty simple instructions here.
A cross-compile is going to be several times faster, so would be the recommended route.

If you are determined to build natively then please make notes. I believe it's pretty straightforward. In general follow the linux instructions.
Use the configure options from the linked readme, but you probably don't want --host, --build, --with-toolchain, and the PATH.
You will need to install a number of "*-dev" packages for the build to succeed. These will generally be the same as linux requires (but there may be a few missing).
config.log should explain what is failing.

[m_o_d]

Hi Thomas,
here is debian jessie image for RPi2: http://sjoerd.luon.net/posts/2015/02/deb...e-on-rpi2/