[Matt Devo]

Is there a cheap keyboard that is known to work for sure?

ask and the Chromebox wiki page shall provide an answer: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=211797

Running the new script on libreelec I get: Failure reading current firmware; cannot proceed. (tried rebooting)

Using the Updating the coreboot Firmware (standalone) instructions.

I have done it before on libreelec so maybe it's the new script? Hard to troubleshoot - any way to get more debugging info?

the standalone firmware updater script hasn't changed, so that's not it. But at least tell me what version of LE you're running so I can try to reproduce here.

I ran into this problem the other day. My version was very old (2014). In order to fix it, I edited the downloaded script and changed lines 54 and 56 from grep to grep -i to make the match case insensitive. I believe there was one other problem. One of of the supporting tools was looking for a directory that didn't exist on my openelec. I don't remember but it might have been /run/var or /run/tmp. I created that directory and the script worked. It wasn't able to read my current MAC address so I just let it use the default. Hope this helps.

Code:

curr_fw=$(echo `dmesg | grep -i -m1 "DMI: Google Panther" | awk '{print $NF}'` | awk -F'/' '{print $3$1$2}')
if [ "$curr_fw" == "" ]; then                                                                              
        curr_fw=$(echo `dmesg | grep -i -m1 "Panther, BIOS" | awk '{print $NF}'` | awk -F'/' '{print $3$1$2}')

changing it to be case-insensitive is a good idea, I'll do that. The only dir used on non-ChromeOS linux is /tmp, which should exist on all systems, so not sure what that would have been about. Some of the early 2014 firmware versions didn't persist the device-specific MAC address, so will use a default one, which isn't an issue unless you have more than one on your LAN (and are using ethernet).