[How to] Dual-booting Libreelec (Kodi) and Lakka (Retroarch)

  • Sharing a quick idea to run both Libreelec and Lakka on the same machine…

    First of all, I know there are few distributions or addons already putting together both Kodi and Retroarch, such as Sx05RE, ScottElec, “Bolt Ons” etc. These are good initiatives; I really appreciate the effort. However, in order to keep up with the lastest Kodi and Retroarch updates their developers have to constantly catch up, which is not always the case.

    So, ideally I want pure Libreelec and pure Lakka running on the same S905(X) box – that would grant me the most flexible setup.

    My approach for few weeks was to use two SD cards, one for each system, swapping them and rebooting. Of course, after few swaps I felt not only bothered by having to manually deal with tiny cards floating around, but also concerned that at some point the box’s SD reader would break… these cheap S905(X) boxes are quite fragile.

    So, to avoid swapping SD cards I came to the following solution:

    1) install Lakka to internal eMMC, using installtointernal command. There’s no way around it, so I lost my original Android installation. Not a big deal, though, I barely used it.

    2) keep Kzsaq’s Libreelec on a SD card.

    So, having Libreelec SD card on at all times means it will always boot to Kodi after powering on.

    Meanwhile, anytime I want to go to Lakka, I just run “Reboot from internal” from Kodi’s power menu. That reboots to Lakka, now installed in the internal memory.

    And to go back to Libreelec, simply reboot it from Retroarch's interface. The box goes back to its standard state, i.e. boot from SD card.

    That’s a simple setup, but allows me to use the lastest Lakka and Libreelec without having to tinker with complex dualboot programming or dealing with hardware SD card swaps. In other words, I can switch systems from my couch!

    Hope this helps.

  • Many thanks for your time and also posting the information. I'm sure others will find the steps useful.

    I've changed your title to make it more informative to other users.