OSMC Final release is out now (and how I upgrade)

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.