Experimental Kodi SFS in xenialpup container

I don't know anything about Kodi. I looked at it briefly years ago, and found the user interface somewhat confusing. Anyway, the purpose of having this Kodi SFS is to demonstrate something very important that EasyOS can do...

There are hundreds of SFS packages created for the various releases of Puppy Linux over the years. An SFS may work with just that version of Puppy, you can't just take any SFS and plonk it into another Puppy distro.

Until now. A couple of weeks ago, I created an SFS for Xenialpup 7.5, the latest official release of Puppy Linux. Blog post here:

http://bkhome.org/news/201811/xenialpup-75-running-in-easyos.html

What this does, is open the door to all of the SFS files created for Xenialpup. I just grabbed Kodi off the Xenialpup Puppy Linux SFS repo at ibiblio.org, to demonstrate. I had to remake the SFS, using 'dir2sfs', to insert some meta-data into the SFS. One of those is a "kodi.specs" file, which has some variables, including:

DB_dependencies='xenialpup_7.*'

What will happen, is when download the kodi SFS, it will also download the xenialpup SFS (if not already), and a container will be created with xenialpup on the bottom layer, kodi on top.

This is just like you are running Xenialpup, except inside a secure container, and you can flip in and out of it.

Let's do it... click the "sfsget" icon at top of screen, and here is the window:

Click the download button, and kodi and xenialpup SFSs will get downloaded, then you will be asked how to install:

Pretty straightforward, just click the "NEW" button. That's it, done. An icon is created on the desktop:

Click on "kodi" and it starts up, full-screen. ALT-F6 to flip back to Easy desktop.

Which is all very well, but I still haven't got a clue how to use Kodi. Billtoo does, and has reported success:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=1011137#1011137

Notice in the above install options, the "EXISTING" button. That option is very interesting. If you had already installed Xenialpup, so had a "xenialpup" desktop, that is an existing container, you can choose to insert an SFS file into it.

Thus, you would have the xenialpup desktop, with kodi available -- well, this is just how it is when you are running the original Xenialpup Puppy Linux and you choose to install the kodi SFS. 

Just to clarify. "NEW" creates an icon on the EasyOS desktop, labeled "kodi", clicking on it just runs kodi. exit kodi, kills the container. "EXISTING", you will not get a "kodi" icon on the EasyOS desktop, but click on the "xenialpup" icon and on the xenialup desktop, kodi is available.  ...I hope that is not confusing. It is quite clear when you actually do it. 

Tags: easy