I’ve been a fan of, and have been using XBMC (now known as Kodi) for a couple of years now, and if you aren’t yet familiar with this great media server project, then here’s the official blurb taken from their website:
“Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media center for playing videos, music, pictures, games, and more. Kodi runs on Linux, OS X, Windows, iOS, and Android, featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. It allows users to play and view most videos, music, podcasts, and other digital media files from local and network storage media and the internet.”
It is a great way of organising and watching media, can stream and be streamed to via UPnP, completely customisable in terms of theme and settings, supports a massive amount of media formats (movies, television, pictures, music and even supports PVR live TV functionality), and is extendable through a myriad of add-ons.
Anyway, I run an XBMCbuntu install on an old desktop machine sitting next to my 40 inch Samsung LCD television in the lounge, and seeing as it has been quite a while since I last updated the software, I thought I would take the jump and upgrade from XBMC to the newly renamed Kodi.
As it turns out, upgrading from a new-ish version of XBMCbuntu to the latest stable release of KodiBuntu is pretty simple.
First, fire up a terminal, either via SSH (if remote – as in my case), exiting XBMC and entering XBMCbuntu itself, or by hitting Ctrl+Alt+F1 to fire up a ‘virtual terminal’ on the machine itself.
From the terminal, run:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install kodi kodi-bin
Once all of that is completed, a simple restart should reveal the new Kodi instance running on your machine.
Yay!
Side note though: If Kodi doesn’t startup when you switch on your machine, you need to make a change in the file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf:
//change user-session=XBMC to user-session=kodi
So ideally your lightdm.conf should now look something like this (obviously with your chosen username though):
[SeatDefaults] xserver-command=/usr/bin/X -bs -nolisten tcp autologin-user=kodi autologin-user-timeout=0 user-session=kodi greeter-session=lightdm-gtk-greeter allow-guest=false default-user=kodi
Now restart the lightdm service:
sudo service lightdm restart
This seems to sort out the issue without fail.
(Also, if you’ve only ever run with the default but great Confluence skin on Kodi/XBMC, do yourself a favour and give Eminence a shot – what a fantastic looking theme!)
Related Link: http://kodi.tv/