Need Kelp With Kodi (Buntu)/xbmc

I've been experimenting with Linux Live USB lately, booting straight into different Linux distro OS's via usb.

The one I'd love to use is Kodi (formerly known as XBMC), but I can't seem to figure out how to find where to enable a wireless internet connection.

I thought I had installed Kodi for Windows and had found the "Enable Wireless Connection" option somewhere, but I feel like I've searched everywhere with Expert options enabled and can't seem to find it.

Anyone out there familiar with xbmc or Kodi? Their forums are ridiculously scattered with highly advanced Linux users and their questions. I've searched exstensively, but can't seem to find an answer to what I'm looking for.

 

Go.to command line. Type these two commands. 'Ifconfig' and 'lspci' post the output of each.

 

I just realized I typed in "kelp" instead of help. Thanks for your help. Might take me a few days, since I'm using my USB stick for backup while reformatting my mom's PC.

I think I know how to go into safe mode to display the command line. Would it be possible to output a log file somehow? Not sure how I would copy/paste that info. I would use virtual box, but when I try to run it in virtual box, it displays an error on boot about not being an x64 processor or something...

 

can't help you with your question, but kelp is good....

 

avoiding these kinds of typos is best, it sure can lead to all kinds of frustration . normally the shell will output an error message or the program won't compile but it *is* possible to really mess something up if ur typo happens to be syntactically legal :O.

Code:

ifconfig wlan0 up

try that and make sure you run with effective uid root. ur network adapter might be called something different than wlan0, if that's the case put that as the device.

 

I've read about doing things as a superuser in the command line prompt. Since the OS is running from USB, would changing certain settings mess with my system... in a way that it might screw up my mobo or prevent me from booting into the OS on my internal hard drive? Or is it like a failsafe, to where if I screw something up it would only apply to what's on the USB? I've been sort of skeptical on doing anything too technical cuz I don't want to mess up my rig. Even if it is just an overpriced paperweight... it's the only one I have

If it does only apply to setting on the USB drive, then I could just format and reload the Linux Live USB files.

 

it sort of depends on whether your live system is persistent. some live systems require that you log in as root as root anyway so in that case you are always root. If ur command line prompt has a '#' then ur probably running as a user with root permissions. usually the prompt will contai. the name of the user and possibly the host name of the machine.

Code:

root #

root

Code:

foo $

running the session as user "foo".

the

Code:

id

utility will tell you about the user that started it. passing the switch "-u" as a command line argument will print only the UID on standard output. if ur UID is > 0 then u are not root.

whether changes will stick depends on whether or not u have a persistent filesystem. read the documentation for your release.

as far as screwing up your mobo that's not gonna happen. the machine will either boot into it or not. you would have to try hard to screw up ur hardware with code.

 

using Kodi with Lili aka Linux Live USB gives options upon booting so you can run it as persistent or live mode. I'm still kind of new to all this stuff lol, but I know persistent saves changed made to the OS while it's running. I'll mess around with it a bit once I transfer these files back to my mom's PC.

 

Okay... so I've created a multiboot USB stick with Kodi and a few other OS's, Troubleshooting/Diagnostic tools etc. I've figured out I can access Lbuntu desktop while running Kodi in a Live environment. I've toyed around with the connection options and still can't seem to get Wifi working. I've put in my router's SSID and WEP Personal encryption key, but for some reason it just won't connect. I'm now attempting to figure out how to partition my hard drive in order to install the Linux OS distribution. Perhaps the OS can't recieve a Wifi signal because it doesn't have access to hardware without being installed on the hard drive itself? I'm still unsure why I need a total of 3 or 4 different partitions in order to install and run Linux from my PC... I'll probably figure that part out tho lol. So complicated!

 

oh and I tried the "ifconfig wlan0 up" command and it came back with an error stating such a device does not exist. Not sure how to figure out my wireless card's device name...

 

Ace and Lode are going to know a lot more about these things than I do. I can give you my newbie 2 cents about how I dealt with a similar problem with puppy linux though.

I tried one puppy flavor, and was able to get it to run, but not network.

Searching linux forums with my make and model number, I found a user complaining that he had a similar network problem with the version I was using, but that networking was fine with another. So I just used the version that was confirmed to work with my machine.

Unless you're married to a particular version, this is an easy fix.

Seems like networking can be tricky, lots of reasons for it not to work. If you have an older machine but have a distro with a newer kernel, the device drivers that you need may have been cut out. Or maybe the other way around, you are using an older kernel that doesn't include your device driver. If you do a search using your networking device plus the words "linux driver", you may be able to find what it needs, then check if the driver is included with the kernel. Installing a missing driver shouldn't be too hard.

 

Apparently, Kodibuntu is based on a somewhat older build of Lubuntu, so that very well may be the case, seeing as my system is almost a decade old now :d

I'm still trying to figure out the install process. Not sure if it's an automated install or if I have to partition my hard drive a certain way first... or if I have to partition a certain way in order to make use of an automated install?? I just don't want to accidentally install it over my Windows partition. Even if I do, I could prob still use TestDisk to get my data back, but data recovery's a pain in the ass. Especially w large hard drives.

 

Why is it that you want to run linux in the first place? Do you specifically want to use a live version? Why did you pick that distro?

 

Kodi is basically a media server running on Lubuntu. Used to be known as XBMC, it's basically a flashy version of Windows Media Center with different plugins, addons, etc. I'm going to try and install it to a partition so that it saves the options I modify. Once I figure out how to enable wireless settings or load my wireless card's drivers if that's the case, that way I won't have to input settings every time I use it in live mode.

I'd like to try toying around with Ubuntu again now that I know a bit more about the way it works. I could even choose to go with Ubuntu and "compile" Kodi through that, but I need to learn a bit more before taking that step, methinks lol.

Right now I'm attempting to create a custom recovery partition so I don't have to reinstall windows and perform 3 days worth of updates every time it gets cluttered or something goes wrong.

 

usually it isnt this difficult, the built in network managers are usually pretty good.

first try this:

Code:

sudo rfkill unblock all

also make sure that you dont have a hardware switch on your machine locking the wifi, some laptops have this, make sure it is switched to on/enabled.

i didnt catch if you mentioned whether this was a laptop or desktop, or whether the wifi card was a usb adapeter of a pci-{e} card. look at ther kernel messages and you should be able to see some specific info about the device, youll have to look for something that sounds like a wifi adapter, ethernet is easier to find, im not sure what patterns to give grep to narrow it down that would work universally.

Code:

#after machine boots and initialize devices
 $ dmesg | less

#if its a usb card, unplug and replug then ...
 $ dmesg | tail

#another way to look for devices that are possible wifi adapter candidates
 $ lspci && echo '' && lsusb

#try using these to get the interface name
 $ sudo nmcli d
 $ sudo iwconfig 

#it might also be useful to look inside /etc/network/interfaces
 $ cat /etc/network/interfaces

if you can obtain as much information as possible and post it plus everything youve tried already that would help a lot for the next person, it helps narrow it down so you dont get people telling you to try stuff that you already tried or isnt going to likely work.

 

So... here I am reporting back. With some good news at least. I learned a nice amount of commands in the little time I've been working with it.

It's ridiculous how technical Linux distributions are, coming from a life-long Windows user. I did, however, fix my WiFi troubles.

Turns out Broadcom Wireless adapters aren't natively supported even with an upgrade command. To get it working, I had to use:

apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

And my laptop's screen is a little burnt out due to overheating because of faulty manufacturing, so I was going into Network Configuration and manually adding my wireless router information... I found out later that I could move the taskbar to the top so I could "see" all my options! (pun intended)

That was the easy part.

Next, I started dealing with my graphics card, which is also unsupported with the base Linux distro, mainly due to AMD's lack of development and support for older video cards. I've done a LOT of research with that and at this point I give up. I've tried the open source drivers (which are 'fglrx' and 'fglrx-amdcccle' [short for Catalyst Control Center... which is all wonky in Windows too])

The basic commands that SHOULD get it running are

apt-get remove --purge fglrx*
(reboot)
apt-get install fglrx
aticonfig --initial
apt-get install xvba-va-driver libve-glx1 libva-egl1 vainfo

Come to find out, first, I couldn't find aticonfig. It was nestled in the /usr/lib/fglrx/bin folder. Then, upon initializing the --initial command, I got an error stating that I didn't have an ATI/AMD graphics adapter. So I downloaded an open source driver to the repository/Synaptic Install Manager. That didn't work, so I downloaded the official Linux driver from AMD's website. Figured out how to unzip the .zip file (which was a chore by itself), build the .run package into 3 .deb files, unpack those files and install them (which took forever) just to get the same result.

Saw somewhere mentioning that I needed to create an Xorg.conf file in order to run 'aticonfig --initial' properly and had an error running 'X -configuration' sooo I researched a workaround for that which was:

stop lightdm
X -configuration
mv xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
start lightdm

There was an error in there too, but it did create an xorg.conf file. Tried running 'aticonfig --initial' again and still got the error. Summary: FAIL.

For now, I'm done with Kodi. I might attempt trying these commands in Ubuntu since Kodi uses a weird filesystem which might be why I'm coming up with errors and having so much trouble, but I remember when I installed Ubuntu, I had screen tears upon booting the OS anyways. So. I'm gonna take a break from all this Linux nonsense! Until I get a new computer with more powerful and compatible hardware at least.

My next project before messing with Ubuntu is Clonezilla with Clonezilla Backup! I'm planning on creating my own custom recovery partition so that (hopefully) I'll never need to use my recovery dvds or perform days upon days of Windows updates ever again!

...Wish me luck!

 

My graphics card is ATI Radeon Mobility HD 3200 / AMD Turion X2 (Ultra) Z-80 in case anyone is wondering or wants to help. I read in a lot of places that the Radeon 2xxx - 4xxx cards are unsupported and people have a really rough time getting them to work properly with Linux distros, but some people seem like they've had success with the open-source drivers on Ubuntu. Mostly the reason why I'm willing to try it again... eventually. I'm definitely giving it a break though after going through all that.

(creates an Ubuntu Live USB) R F L

 

yeah lol, in windows you dont usually see all the stuff that has to go un under the hood to make it all happen.

i actually wrote some code that should fix LCD burnt pixels, after displaying the same image for a while the pixels can get stuck, however "excercising" them can help them get "unstuck" ... it works by writing an alternating grid of black and white pixels to the framebuffer, after each scanline the pixels are swapped out, and after every comolete frame each scanline is swapped which basically gives you a grid of alternating black and white pixels flashing at 60hz and the pixels appear to all move to one corner of the screen.

i can give you the source code for it if you want, its a pretty simple program. compiling it is easy.

the generic open source drivers are okay as long as you dont intend to do too much, its hard to say how well theyd work without having experience trying with that particular graphics chipset.

be careful messing with the video drivers, you dont wanna screw up Xorg or itll be a headache probably involving un installing ur display manager and everything all the way down and then reinstalling / reconfiguring everything again. it shouldnt be a big deal though, just make sure your sober when you do it

i generally would suggest that you try the generic drivers out and see if you really need anything more, they may work just fine. I have an AMD card and the catalyst drivers from AMD are very good and easy to install. if you want to run something like VMware with 3D acceleration you need these drivers.

i just looked at the AMD site and did not see your gpu supported by their latest linux driver .. you might wanna dig deeper, i dont have time to look further right now. you could try that driver, but make sure you back up /etc/X11/xorg.conf in case shit hits the fan. the install script is supposed to automatically do thay but id make my own copy just in case if i was gonna try things that arent explicitly supported.

Code:

#make a copy of xorg.conf
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup

learning a little bit of shell scripting is a valuable thing for working with linux, you dont have to become an expert, im not, but i do tend to write scripts for doing complex tasks, especially if i think it might be useful to be able to do again ... that way all i have to do is to run that script and dont have to actually remember all the different steps and things.

 

oh btw ... for doing backups i just use gnu tar to make an archive of my home directory. it is a bitch but simply because the archives are so big that i dont have a way to hold more than one of them at a time on an external drive, so i have to delete the previous backup to make room to hold the new one.

for your root partition you can use 'dd' to make a block by block copy either to a file or to another parition/device. you can actually copy a whole hard drive too, and since it copies at the device level and not the filesystem level it will preserve the partition tables and everything. you will need a place to hold the image thats as least as big as the partition you are copying.

im assuming that you have / on ine partition and /home on a different partition. some people keep /var, /tmp, and /usr on seperate partitins but i dont do that. 10GB should be plenty big for the root partition, i use 16gig personally because i have a big hard drive. dd copies everything including the empty blocks so the resulting size is exactly the size of the partition. you can compress the file though and that will shrink it down. i was able to shrink mine down to about 8GB using bzip2 compression.

so this is what i do


#backup home folder to external device

$ cd /mnt/backup/ && tar -p -cvf home.tar ~/*

#make and image of the root partition
#on my machine its /dev/sda4, might be different for yours
#make damn sure you get it right

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda4 of=~/rootfs-sda4 bs=64K

#then i create md5 and sha1 hash for the image so i can verify its integrity later on

$ md5sum rootfs-sda4 > MD5SUM
$ sha1sum rootfs-sda4 > SHA1SUM

i also made a backup of my partition table when i partitioned the disk, you can do this anytime though.

i then take those 4 files (the filesystem image, the two hash digest files, and the partition table backup) and use tar and compress with bzip2 compression so i end up with a much smaller single file rootfs-date.tar.bz2. you could use gzip to speed up compression at the expense of possibly size. then i burn that file onto a bluray disc.

the home.tar file i put on an external hard drive since its far too big to fit on a bluray disc. the cool thing about the bluray discs though is that theyre pretty cheap, and you can keep many different "revision" from different dates.

oh yea, i left out that i create a hash digest of the GPT partition table too. you don't have to do that, but i do just in case the partition table somehow got messed up.

 

Hmm, you seem a little more advanced than I am right now... and by a little I actually mean a lot

So, scripting... Can I create a script to run my beginning setup just by separating commands with #? That would make reinstalling a hell of a lot simpler. I just deleted Kodibuntu and used easybcd to restore Windows' MBR. I'm also lacking a CD-ROM drive so burning cd's or dvd's is out of the question until I get a new PC or an external drive. Haha that's what makes this so tricky cuz I only have one USB with enough space and speed to get any use out of it. Plus, if something goes terribly wrong, it's my only source of recovery media

Backups for the Linux OS would be nice. I'm so used to being able to use System Restore in Windows. It seems like a luxury now! Or a trip back in time before Restore was an option. I just about burnt out our old Windows 98 SE disc way back when lol.

That LCD burnt pixel program sounds like it might be useful. I'm not sure if it would work though. Did a bit of research on my rig and it turns out with the overheating and where they placed things on the inside, it melts the connector or connector cable resulting in flashy/mirrored bits at the bottom of the screen. I've seen people say that it eventually works it's way up the screen until it's completely unusable (without HDMI output), but mine's been like this for years now. Wouldn't hurt to give it a go though!

Also, after I installed and uninstalled the video drivers in Linux a few times, once I logged back into Windows, I had a command prompt pop up. It minimized and when I brought it back up, I saw it said something about AMD Catalyst Control Center, ERROR: (something or other) and closed out. Thought that was a bit strange. Is it possible the OS's were communicating with each other? Maybe a confirmation thing?