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Kodi on Debian/Ubuntu/etc
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The official wiki page for this sort of thing is at https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:HOW-TO:Autostart_Kodi_for_Linux, which points to https://github.com/graysky2/kodi-standalone-service. Here's some modified takes on the official-ish instructions. This presumes you're running Ubuntu 19.04 on a Pi 3, or have a similar setup to that.

NOTE: You could also just use something like LibreELEC if having a full OS on the machine isn't important to you.

Step 1, Variant A: Kodi from the main repos, using X11

Install Kodi and xinit with apt install kodi xinit xserver-xorg.

Create /etc/systemd/system/kodi.service with the contents as

/etc/systemd/system/kodi.service
[Unit]
Description=Kodi standalone (X11)
After=systemd-user-sessions.service network-online.target sound.target mysqld.service
Requires=network-online.target
Conflicts=getty@tty1.service

[Service]
User=kodi
Group=kodi
PAMName=login
TTYPath=/dev/tty1
ExecStart=/usr/bin/xinit /usr/bin/kodi-standalone -- :0 -nolisten tcp vt1
Restart=on-abort
StandardInput=tty

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target

Step 1, Variant B: Kodi customized with hardware acceleration, using GBM

Either compile it yourself or grab a package. If you're using the latest Raspbian a new-enough and correctly compiled version is reportedly available in the main repos (as of this writing untested by @keithzg).

Make sure to set the following in config.txt (may be either /boot/config.txt or /boot/firmware/config.txt, depending on the distro):

config.txt
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
gpu_mem=256

Then use the following service file (changing the path used by ExecStart if you've compiled it yourself and installed to a different path):

/etc/systemd/system/kodi.service
[Unit]
Description=Kodi standalone (GBM)
After=systemd-user-sessions.service network.target network-online.target sound.target upower.service mysqld.service
Requires=graphical.target
Wants=network.target network-online.target
Conflicts=getty@tty1.service

[Service]
User=kodi
Group=kodi
PAMName=login
TTYPath=/dev/tty1
Environment=WINDOWING=gbm
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kodi-standalone
Restart=on-abort
StandardInput=tty

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target
WARNING: For some reason the environment line here causes Kodi from the Raspbian repos to fail, so comment it out if on Raspbian.

Step 2

# Add the group
sudo addgroup kodi
# Add the user, giving it no login shell and with /var/lib/kodi as its home directory
sudo useradd -c 'kodi user' -u 420 -g kodi -G audio,input,uucp,video -d /var/lib/kodi -s /usr/sbin/nologin kodi
# Not sure why this is necessary frankly, since the shell is set to nologin anyways
sudo passwd -l kodi > /dev/null 
# Actually make the home directory we're using, and set ownership correctly
sudo mkdir /var/lib/kodi
sudo chown -R kodi:kodi /var/lib/kodi

# Now, enable and start the service
sudo systemctl enable kodi.service
sudo systemctl start kodi.service

Further reading

If setting up on a Raspbian system, https://www.enricozini.org/blog/2019/himblick/cleanup-raspbian/ has some interesting notes on some of the customizations Raspbian has done compared to plain Debian.

Last Author
keithzg
Last Edited
Nov 30 2019, 1:14 AM

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