Kodi Community Forum

Hi,

I would like to install the official Kodi packages on Debian. For this, i want to use the official 'install kodi for linux' guide on the wiki, specifically the 'Installing Kodi on Debian-based distributions' on: https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kodi_for_Linux

Now, after adding the repo's, i cannot update them since apt update gives me an error, so i cant update:

Of course, this seems to make sense, since apparently, the repo that is added using:
only seems to contain Ubuntu packages. It refers to impish, and not to buster/bullseye or whatever.

So, my main question is:

• Why is that?
  
• Where are the official packages for Debian?  (or do they not exist, and, for my interest, if so, why not).
  
• If there are no official packages for Debian, can I install the ubuntu ones ?
  

I am just a bit struck that the guide saying 'install on Debian' seems only to work on Ubuntu. There probably is a good reason for this, but it is somewhat inconvenient.

Thanks,

Alexander.

We only directly support Linux on Ubuntu.

Debian take and compile/distribute the source code themselves, and make some tweaks and adjustments to it themselves for various reasons.

So install under Debian is under the Debian apt repositories, and is supported by them, and not directly by us (as we don't know what changes they choose to make to their version of Kodi).

(2021-05-20, 17:12)DarrenHill Wrote: [ -> ]We only directly support Linux on Ubuntu.

Debian take and compile/distribute the source code themselves, and make some tweaks and adjustments to it themselves for various reasons.

So install under Debian is under the Debian apt repositories, and is supported by them, and not directly by us (as we don't know what changes they choose to make to their version of Kodi).

Thanks.

Yes, I more or less figured that.
Can you elaborate on why that is ? ( i.e. why the specific Ubuntu choice? ).

Mostly due to lack of volunteers interested in supporting it on platforms other than Ubuntu, the wide proliferation of flavours of Linux and the capability of building from source where required.

Plus the kind of user who would use some of the smaller flavours tend to be those who are comfortable with (and indeed would prefer to) build their own from source and tailor it to their specific needs.

And in the case of Debian, as noted they compile and roll their own, so as part of that they take on the support mantle too, at least for compatibility, dependency and crash purposes.

to be fair, the kodi packages in debian sid (kodi 19.0) and experimental (kodi 19.1) should be in fairly good shape.

probably you can use for Debian Buster the repo from https://deb-multimedia.org/, there is Kodi 18.9, ffmpeg and so on within.

Deb-multimedia is a wild card repo. For whatever reason the maintainer(s) of it refuse to work with the official Debian team to be sure things are good for stable. I don't know why and frankly don't much care. I do know that you can sometimes get updates from deb-multimedia that overwrite official Debian packages. In the past this has caused a number of issues which usually end up on the Debian forum and they can't do anything about it because they didn't build those packages. While plenty on their forums do use it, it's not recommended and at your own risk. One of the general suggestions if you intend to use it is to get what you need, then comment out that line in your /etc/apt/sources.list. That alone worries me if it's that much of a potential problem.

You are better off compiling it straight from source. The instructions are pretty much step by step. I know I tried to backport it from the Ubuntu ppa once on Debian but kept running into an issue with a dependency. I gave up after awhile.

Don't take what I say as gospel on the deb-multimedia. Just what I've gathered over a number of years around that forum.

(2021-05-22, 06:18)jmgibson1981 Wrote: [ -> ]Deb-multimedia is a wild card repo. For whatever reason the maintainer(s) of it refuse to work with the official Debian team to be sure things are good for stable. I don't know why and frankly don't much care.

There was a massive fall-out between them some time ago as he was positioning himself as a semi-official repository. They asked him to stop, offered to buy the domain, offered to support packaging and suggested alternative domains and branding that they would help with in the transition... and he refused it all. In my experience, he also messes with versioning so his packages are always preferred to the official ones (look at MythTV PVR for Kodi and how the up-to-date Debian Sid package is numbered significantly lower than the old version of the dmo package.) so when updates happen, things break.
It really is best to steer clear of there.

If you're using Buster, there's a repo here it is nightly, so you might want to get a full working version and turn off updates until Bullseye is released.