Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

OSMC on the Raspberry Pi

Filed under
GNU
Linux
Hardware
Movies

Hot on the heels of LibreELEC follows a test of OSMC. The nice thing about this little board is that you can have as many operating systems as you like and just swap them out as easy as loading another Micro SD. So your device can go from media center to OpenWRT router in a flash, for example. And because they are tiny you can always have a whole collection of them handy for the various roles the Pi can perform.

OSMC is another specialist operating system whose aim it is to provide just enough an environment to run Kodi. As such Kodi is the only graphical interface you get and not only its own settings but also all system configuration options have to be accessible through the Kodi interface.
The web site claims that "OSMC can play all major media formats out there and supports a variety of sharing protocols so you’re guaranteed to be able to stream from other devices. OSMC can stream media and serve files to other devices as well!"
The media center being extremely themeable, OSMC in its current iteration has a refreshed and really nice looking but still functional skin that I wished would be available as a free version for general download but it seems the main developer is guarding his logo and distiguishing features jealously so this may not be possible.

[...]

You can then install this repository from the file manager like any other and add the plugin from here (see instructions). The advantage of this plugin is that it has a huge pre-populated list of VPN providers and their locations which you can easily switch within the app.
OpenVPN needs to be installed first with „apt-get install openvpn“ as unlike LibreELEC it is not part of OSMC by default.
Unfortunately despite doing this and OpenVPN being up and running the VPN plugin did not connect for me. Odd, as OSMC like its cousin is based on Debian Buster. This points to some other underlying incompatibility in OSMC with the VPN manager plugin. I'm not willing to troubleshoot this when there's another solution that works equally well and better in this case but there are other, more traditional OpenVPN plugins for Kodi around like this one that let you import configurations if you really want to stay with OSMC.

If you got yourself a remote like this one it's easy and fluid to navigate around the interface once everything has been set up and your plugins imported or set up from the media repositories. The choice of add-ons in the included repo is not great and probably not enough to satisfy most users. If you thought OSMC might distribute more than just some of the basic free add-ons from the Kodi repository you will be disappointed. Not even the BBC iplayer. Ok, that one is broken anyway. If you're serious about streaming you'll have to install your own but with ever more websites like the BBC breaking plugins with redesigns on purpose and Youtube requiring an API key to stream the future might lie in the browser.

Read more

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.