Kodi Community Forum

Hello
I'm new here, so hello everyone *waves*
I recently fell in love with Kodi and got now one problem. Before my media pc was just a laptop with a browser, filemanager and vlc player. in kodi I am missing the browser feature.
Kodibuntu lets you use a web browser when you log out, and log in again with different desktop session.
I want to access my webbrowser quicker, and im okay with sacrificing resources.

So would it be possible to launch a normal desktop session on boot, then kodi, and minimize kodi if I want my browser? And if yes how do I do it?
Is there a plugin to launch an external application and bring it to the foreground?

Im happy for any feedback, so if I am totally following the wrong path, please tell me

regards
miux

Some time ago i achieved exactly what you described starting from a clean ubuntu installation (but there shouldn't be a lot of differences).

The best solution I found was to create a multiseat environment.
In this way at login 2 user logs in 2 different desktops environment and when you use one the other 'sleeps'

In my case the default user 'master' log into the unity desktop while the user 'xbmc' logs into kodi.
I can quickly switch between the 2 seats by pressing CTRL+ALT+F7 for desktop environment and CTRL+ALT+F8 for kodi.

to achieve this you have to :

1) Create a secondary user that will login to the other environment.

2) Edit the file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and add an additional seat
my lightdm.conf :
as you can see i added the [Seat:1] configuration stating that the user xbmc has to auto login to the KODI session

3) at this point if you restart you should have the 2 desktop environment and you should be able to switch between them but probably you will not be able to reproduce any sound on one of the 2 environment. this is because the pulseaudio service is available only for one of the 2 user.

4) to have audio working on both environment you must change the pulseaudio service to run as system service instead as user service.
To achieve this you have to edit the file /etc/pulse/pulseaudio.conf and change the line
env DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=0
to
env DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=1

5) reboot and everything should work

only issue i have is that i have some sound running on the desktop and i move to kodi environment i obviously loose the passthrough audio feature.
I have to go back to the desktop env, close the application that was using the audio sink, go back to kodi and the audio works perfectly again.

Im using this way for browsing and streaming http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=170965

If this was an android machine then it would and is very easy to do this.
Having two boxes one running android the other ubuntu, I have found that it is just as quick to exit Kodi to the Ubuntu desktop, use the browser and other programs and then restart Kodi .I have Kodi on all the time as my wife just needs to be able to press the remote and i'ts there.
Just my thoughts

you could start the browser from the favorites with "advanced launcher" or use kodibuntu with lxde enviroment, where you can swith (alt+tab) between running programs.
In the lxde enviroment you have to mark kodi for autostart.