Doing more with LibreELEC

Updated 1,853 Days AgoPublic

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So, wanna take a shortcut to a working accelerated Kodi system on a Pi or such, but now you want more than what you get out of the box? Lets do this.

Difficulty 1: Existing Addons

The officially-supported way to add more functionality to LibreELEC is, unsurprisingly, via Kodi Addons.

The easiest way then is if you find Kodi addons already available for your purposes. Specifically, https://github.com/thoradia/thoradia has many of what one would need, like a torrent client (ie. Transmission or rTorrent).

Difficulty 2: Create an Addon

If you don't see what you need already available as an addon, you could consider following the official instructions for compiling LibreELEC's addons combined with the official documentation for developing Kodi addons. But it might actually be easier to just compile on the device itself...

Difficulty 3: Compiling on LibreELEC itself

First, to compile things you'll likely need some of the following tools. Unfortunately the tar that BusyBox ships with is insufficient for a lot of legitimate tar files that source code might come in, so here's some repackaging in simple ZIP files for convenience's sake:

Using busybox, the ./configure runs will be full of ./configure: eval: line 1: expr: not found. So you won't actually see the output. Lame! But it is doing stuff. But doesn't seem to work entirely in the end?

GNU Mes might help with the boostrapping problem a bit, but you still need an actual compiler probably to start all of this.

https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-software/developer-tools/gnu-toolchain/gnu-a/downloads has tools that could be used for cross-compiling, but cross-compiling is a PITA.

https://elinux.org/Toolchains might be the best place to look, and to avoid cross-compiling maybe https://elinux.org/Toolchains#musl.cc ?