After a year in the making, OSMC, the successor to Raspbmc, has reached final stable release status.
Believe it or not, I’m now running this release on the original 256mb model B Raspberry Pi, the same one I preorderd on 29th February 2012! It’s running from an SD card and it’s just as quick as when I was using a USB3 stick with previous OSMC installs.
It’s a real credit to Sam and his team that they’ve got the latest Kodi running silky smooth on not only a 3 year old credit card sized computer running with 256mb of RAM (this still amazes me!) but also on a range of other platforms.

Anyway, the point of this post is my upgrade routine. I usually let OSMC and Raspbmc update themselves, but as I’m always tinkering with my Pi installing all sorts of add ons and packages behind the scenes, I also like to do a fresh install every now and again – so this is a perfect opportunity to do so.

1. First things first, I backup settings on the existing install. I do this by SFTP’ing into the Pi using FileZilla and grabbing all the files I need:

• /boot/config.txt – contains any custom boot options I may have added
• /etc/hyperion.congig.json – my hyperion settings
• /home/osmc/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml – this contains my mySQL library database settings
• /home/osmc/.kodi/userdata/sources.xml – folder sources I have added
• /home/osmc/.kodi/userdata/favourites.xml – well… favourite apps/scripts I have fave’d
• /home/osmc/.kodi/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml – custom button mapping for my Samsung TV remote via CEC

2. Once these files are safely installed on my laptop, I will go ahead and format my SD card then run the OSMC installer to install the latest OSMC version.

3. Pop the SD card into the Pi, fire it up and let OSMC installer do it’s thing.

4. The first thing I do on a new install is SSH into it and change the password. Sounds lame, it’s only a Kodi install what’s the worst that someone could do, change some settings? Well it’s worth remembering that running a Pi with a default username/password connected to the internet basically gives someone a way into your home network where they could do a lot more damage. So yes, change your password by  SSH’ing in and running this command: passwd and following the instructions.

5. SFTP into the Pi and replace all the files you backed up previously… except for config.txt, you should set those settings within OSMC, but it’s worth referring to the backed up file from the last install.

6. Install hyperion.  Follow this blog post, including the bit about boot.config to get hyperion up and running.

7. Reboot

8. Within OSMC, enable the web server on port 8080 (Settings > Services > Webserver) and any other settings you wish to configure.

9. I pre-generate all thumbnails/fanart as it makes browsing for the first time a lot nicer. To do this, install texturecache.py

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MilhouseVH/texturecache.py/master/texturecache.py
chmod +x ./texturecache.py

and then run these commands to generate the images:

./texturecache.py c movies
./texturecache.py c tvshows

This can take a while depending on the size of your library and which device you have.

Once that finishes, my OSMC is pretty much back to how I like it, but if you have a non-standard setup there may be a few additional tweaks you need to apply or incorporate into the above.

As cool as a Hyperion/boblight/ambilight set up is, sometimes you want to disable the LEDs for whatever reason. You could SSH into your Pi and stop the Hyperion service or just flick the power switch on the LED power supply, but if you’re lazy like me, then you’ll probably want an even easier way to perform this task!

How about a single button press on your remote control to toggle the Hyperion service?

It’s actually pretty simple, first create a bash script which checks if the service is running. If it is, it disables it, if not it will enable it.

#!/bin/bash

if [ `sudo /sbin/initctl status hyperion | grep running | wc -l` = 1 ]
then
	curl -v -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"id":1,"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"GUI.ShowNotification","params":{"title":"Hyperion","message":"Disabled","image":"/home/pi/hyperion.png"}}' http://127.0.0.1:8080/jsonrpc
	sudo /sbin/initctl stop hyperion

else
	curl -v -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"id":1,"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"GUI.ShowNotification","params":{"title":"Hyperion","message":"Enabled","image":"/home/pi/hyperion.png"}}' http://127.0.0.1:8080/jsonrpc
	sudo /sbin/initctl start hyperion
fi

Save the above script as /home/pi/toggleHyperion.sh and make it executable:

chmod +x /home/pi/toggleHyperion.sh

Next you need to modify your remote.xml config:

nano /home/pi/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml

Add this line somewhere between the < global > and < / global > tags:

<blue>XBMC.System.Exec("/home/pi/toggleHyperion.sh")</blue>

In my case I assigned the script to the blue button. You can obviously assign it to whichever button you want.

Finally, copy the Hyperion icon to your home folder (this image is used for the notification within XBMC):

wget http://pibob.nadnerb.co.uk/images/hyperion.png -o /home/pi/hyperion.png

Edit – Just realised you may need to install curl if you don’t have it already – this is what’s used to send the popup notification to XBMC.

sudo apt-get install curl

Then reboot your Pi.

With any luck, pressing the blue button will turn off your LEDs and display a notification in XBMC. Pressing again should switch your LEDs on.

If it’s not working, check your xbmc http server is running on port 8080.

Enjoy 🙂