OpenELEC — Rants and Why I Will NOT use it

The OpenELEC (OpenELEC: Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center, http://openelec.tv), a promising HTPC distribution, but it’s anything but.

Reasons why I do not recommend it:

1. They offer no ISO builds. WTF? They only offer two equally difficult installation options, and not for the beginner, either. A “disk image” in img format that does not boot or can be converted to ISO format; and a manual install that people would just abandon.

A forum post on OpenELEC Community has asked over and over… then somewhere a “mod (knight) in shining armor” defends why not, and it’s equally retarded:

I’d say that 99% of OpenELEC users have no optical drive in their HTPC box and .iso is an optical image format. We get one or two people in the forums or IRC channel who rant and moan about the lack of an “essential” format like .iso every six months .. which (from our perspective) clearly proves the case for not having one.

That’s straight from a moderator’s mouth.

A little too overconfident, eh, chewitt??

Well, cite your research that “99% of HTPC users” don’t have an optical drive” (not counting Raspberry Pis and similar) and I’ve got some waterfront property in the desert for ya… 😉

An ISO file is easy for a beginner to install and use. Your instructions are more suited for a rocket scientist than someone trying to ditch Comcast or Cox, DirecTV, Dish, whatever.

Which brings me to.. 2. Even if install is successful, it’s a miracle if it boots…

Here’s some Google searches for all y’all..

OpenELEC not booting

OpenELEC Raspberry Pi Not Booting

Enjoy! 😀

But no matter what, people are leaving OpenELEC because it’s simply difficult to install and use!

And finally… 3. If OpenELEC has a problem with official Kodi.tv add-ons.

Quite a lot of Kodi.tv repo add-ons that work in other builds of Kodi are broken in OpenELEC.

I’d rather use GeeXBoX, which is an embedded Kodi distribution and comes–default!–as an ISO. Or, OSMC (Open Source Media Center), which only runs on a Raspberry Pi, and I currently use it on my Raspberry Pi 2.

That’s my rant for today.

My Moving Away From The Old And Familiar…

I’m not talking about moving from one location to another (even though I’ve done that personally very recently, but it’s irrelevant), but changing distributions from the vastly popular (Ubuntu) to a pretty popular alternative. Now I’m not talking about installing one of the thousands (possibly tens or hundreds of thousands) of Ubuntu derivatives out there (I even made one… it’s hosted on SourceForge… JuggalOS-Ubuntu, but it’s rife with problems…), but changing the total landscape from a Debian-based distro to an RPM-based one. I like having newer versions of software, and basically Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is a paid-for Linux distribution (you get support and all that nice stuff)/CentOS (free as in free weed) is like Debian in a sense: you get well-tested, rock-stable, but older, software that’s suitable for environments that cannot have hiccups for anything. One forum I use a lot (decline to link) is a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL|MariaDB/PHP|Perl|Python) stack on a CentOS7 server platform. (In fact, one of the people who own the forum kind of recommended me to try it out, or at least Fedora if I wanted newer versions of software.)

And that is what I done. I am using Fedora 21 now. I used to use an Ubuntu derivative I supported, LXLE (formerly known as Lubuntu eXtra Life Edition until Canonical decided to add LTS [Long-Term Support] starting with Lubuntu 14.04, now known as Lubuntu eXtra Luxury Edition…), which had some good software… but it was bogged down with a load of Launchpad PPA archives.

I started to have problems with that. No offense to the person who spent hours on it perfecting it… but Launchpad PPAs are only hosted on one server. In the United Kingdom. There are no other mirrors worldwide that would handle the load if that Canonical server gets overloaded, or, if it goes down for any reason.

Out I took Ubuntu (or the derivative LXLE), and in came Fedora 21. It’s a Fedora spin. It uses the KDE desktop, which I love more than the GNOME desktop, or its Ubuntu offshoot Unity (which has a lot of fanboys and haters alike… I fall in the hater category of that)… and when I first cut my Linux teeth back in 2005 with Debian 3.1 “sarge”, I used the KDE desktop because it had a familiar look and feel to it. (Yes, Windows… but I digress…) Of course, that was KDE SC 3.5, which is no longer supported by KDE themselves, but you can download an updated fork of it titled Trinity.

But a clean Fedora install only has two (?) repositories enabled. The main and updates/security repos. Every Ubuntu derivative had basically the “main”, “universe” and “multiverse” repos enabled, plus a few others, more likely Launchpad Personal Package Archives (that is what PPA means) to basically suit the tastes and needs of the person “spinning” the derivative. Sometimes they meet the needs of their target users, but it’s not a perfect solution.

Of course, you don’t get MP3 playback out of the box in Fedora. That’s because legally, they’re not allowed to include it. One piece of advice. Don’t fool with the GStreamer backend. I prefer the VLC backend for audio, because one simple command…

sudo yum -y install phonon-backend-vlc

will enable playback for all media. I’d also recommend you install the VLC player alongside that too.

And instead of adding one Launchpad PPA after another to get the software you need… Fedora (and other RPM-based distros) has a better solution: RPMFusion. All you need to do is add two more repos to your /etc/yum.repos.d directory (Instructions in the provided link) and that’s it, you’ll have access to more software without the messiness of figuring out which Launchpad PPA is causing the problem.

But working with Fedora is not like working with Ubuntu. But that’s the pleasure of working with Linux. You’re not locked into one certain kind of way of doing things. But, on the other hand, working with Linux can sometimes be like using C-4 explosives to open a bag of potato chips… if you get what I mean… 😉

But my days with Ubuntu are over. I converted over to Fedora, and I like it better.