Reporting: one newuser's experience fwiw

  • [Disclosure: this seems to be a bug to me, but I do have time only to dash off this report and not participate in any debugging. Consider it merely as a potential heads up.]

    I have a Raspberry Pi v1 Model B 512MB, using a 16GB Class 6 SD card. I have had this working for years with Raspbian, until it sophisticated itself beyond the reach of the hardware.

    Intrigued by the "Just enough OS" approach, I downloaded the LibreELEC-RPi.arm-9.2.3.img image and the 64-bit LibreELEC USB-SD.Creator.Linux.bin and used the latter to install the former on a 64-bit Linux workstation with an SD-card slot.

    Running the Creator, I selected my download image and the SD-card device (happened to be /dev/sdc, which showed sdc1 at 512MB and sdc2 at 14.9GB) and Write. It finished correctly, and the card booted into Kodi on the RPi. Two days later Kodi hung/froze in trying to enter folders it had successfully entered previously.

    In the process of troubleshooting, I happened to run 'df' and discovered that sdc2 had been resized by Creator to a mere 32MB, and was 100% full. Kodi had seized up because it had run out of disk space.

    I took the card back to the workstation and deleted all partitions (with gparted) and ran Creator again, presenting an empty /dev/sdc. The same resizing problem happened.

    I then ran gparted on the SDcard and resized/maximized sdc2 back to 14.9GB and the problem has not recurred--and the system works, if not particularly speedily. Movies play fine, thank you very much.

    However I was never presented with an opportunity to set my timezone and it came up 5 hours ahead.

    I later found the menu setting to change it in, of all places, Settings->Interface->Regional. With due respect, this is a poor choice if as I suspect most people will think of it as a System setting.

    Unfortunately, there are no "time" settings to be found there; instead, the ntp settings are found in another unusual place: Settings->LibreELEC(the Other system)->Network.

    Developers have the last say in where things are to be found, but may I suggest that it would be a boon to users if settings could be found "wherever users might logically be expected to look", that is by multiple paths implemented by soft links.

    In any case, the system did not ask me at first boot to supply corrections to assumptions it had made, and I think this is unhelpful to newusers.

    Finally, on my LibreELEC install, I wanted to watch "Movies", but every attempt I made to "add files" to "Movies" were installed, instead, in "Videos." I finally removed the Movies entry on the menu (ditto TV Shows) because they are apparently just aliases for Videos, which nevertheless I would like to be able to rename.

    P.S. I struggled with adding the OpenWeathermap-Extended add-on--seeing ridiculous output, even after getting an APIid, only to have OWMe complain about an error and refer to a mysterious "log" somewhere before FINALLY learning in this forum that "OpenWeathermap-Extended Add-on is DEPRECATED".

    In my opinion, it's a Bug when DEPRECATED Add-ons appear next to Supported ones, as if they are equal.