advice on moving from OE to LE

1st Official Post

    I have a small build based on an Intel i3-2100t that has been running on OE for several years. It has started stuttering a bit on local sources. Looking into updating it, I have discovered the community is switching to LE.

    Can I presumably migrate from OE to LE without much fuss? Can I backup and then import my db or will I lose all my users and watched status etc?

    Does lsellen's audo repo work smoothly on LE, and will I be able to import these configurations as well? It can take sevearl hours to set all that stuff up and I'd rather avoid that if I can!

    on OE I had my network drives mounted so that they showed up in the normal "storage" area, so that they appeared local to the addons. I don't entirely rememeber how I set this up, but it worked permanently without a hitch for the past 3 years. I did this to use my fast SSD in my OE machine to do all the temporary storage tasks and save the (slow) NAS for long term storage only. Will this type of setup work on LE?

    Thanks!

    • Official Post
    Quote

    Can I presumably migrate from OE to LE without much fuss? Can I backup and then import my db or will I lose all my users and watched status etc?

    Yes and yes...not sure about the watched status.


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    Does lsellen's audo repo work smoothly on LE, and will I be able to import these configurations as well? It can take sevearl hours to set all that stuff up and I'd rather avoid that if I can!

    Never heard of it, sorry.

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    on OE I had my network drives mounted so that they showed up in the normal "storage" area, so that they appeared local to the addons. I don't entirely rememeber how I set this up, but it worked permanently without a hitch for the past 3 years. I did this to use my fast SSD in my OE machine to do all the temporary storage tasks and save the (slow) NAS for long term storage only. Will this type of setup work on LE?

    I won't see a reason why not.

    I had serious reservations about transferring over, being a bit of a Luddite.

    Couldn't have been easier.

    Downloaded the image and created a USB stick.

    Booted the device which was using OpenElec using the USB stick.

    Selected the update option and let it do it's thing.

    Re-booted the system, job done. It really is much better.

    To be clear, any local media I am using is on the hard drive of the device so I can't comment on the process if it is stored externally. However all of my add-ons still worked, only better.

    So you didn't even have to re-install your addons? It updates your existing installation? Did it automatically import your library?

    For others reading this thread, here is what I did:

    - used the backup addon in OE to create a full backup, including addon data (you have to enable it in the addon config)

    - transferred the backup folder to a network share

    - loaded the generic full image of LE onto a USB

    - boot htpc from the usb

    - attempted an upgrade. The installer errored, not enough room on the disk (this means my OE system partition got too full over the years and there isn't enough room for the upgrade)

    - decided to just do a clean install, accepting all the "this will wipe everything" warnings.

    - Booted up into LE and downloaded the "backup" addon from the kodi repository

    - Restored the backup

    This took awhile, but seems to have worked. Everything came back (including the audo addon) and works well. Everything feels much, much faster.

    I'm sure there was an easier way but just sharing what I did and confirming it worked!

    Quote from chewitt


    The easier way was to just drop the update .tar file into the 'updates' samba share on the OE box and reboot. Clean reinstall doesn't achieve much if you dirty it up straight away by restoring everything from the backup :)

    Newbie here, and just did this to install Libreelec (came over from an old test version of OE based on Kodi 15.2 on an ASRock BeeBox N3000). I was just holding off until a stable v. 8 of LE came out, but I started getting some freezes. Hopefully moving over here will iron out any problems. Everything is looking good so far.

    Quote from chewitt


    The easier way was to just drop the update .tar file into the 'updates' samba share on the OE box and reboot. Clean reinstall doesn't achieve much if you dirty it up straight away by restoring everything from the backup :)

    Awesome! Thanks for making it so easy! I will give this a try tonight. I was growing tired of waiting for an OE update. ZZZzzzzz

    Quote from chewitt


    The easier way was to just drop the update .tar file into the 'updates' samba share on the OE box and reboot. Clean reinstall doesn't achieve much if you dirty it up straight away by restoring everything from the backup :)

    Is it just as simple to to revert to OE 6.0.3 if one finds issues? Have invested a lot of time in the setup of addons, so cautious about an upgrade. Thanks!

    • Official Post

    Sort of yes/no. The core OS will downgrade that easily but our add-ons are numerically numbered higher than OE's so the best thing is to take a full backup of OE before and then clean install OE and restore the backup to fully revert. That would be a last ditch action though :)

    Quote from chewitt


    The easier way was to just drop the update .tar file into the 'updates' samba share on the OE box and reboot. Clean reinstall doesn't achieve much if you dirty it up straight away by restoring everything from the backup :)

    I should also have asked whether the /flash partition has increased much in size from 0E 6.0.3? I'm currently using 77% of a 230Mb /flash which probably should have been larger when I originally installed. I know I can resize, but there is always risk. Thanks!
    /dev/sda1 230.4M 174.0M 52.3M 77% /flash

    I dropped the .tar file into the update folder 2 times and I got the "no kernel or system" error. I went back and checked the .tar file and saw the files in the target folder, so I tried again and it worked.

    So easy and seamless.

    I dropped the .tar file into my update folder, restarted and my system refused to boot! Had to download the installer to a USB drive and do a repair. All fixed now but it gave me a bit of a scare at first!