Posts by C0NPAQ

Thanks for all the info so far, but I will now try to just install archlinux for arm, which has some 905 support and the accelerated X11 drivers, and chromium and firefox and all that. Not sure how fiddly it is, but nothing can be worse at this point.

Its nice that Kodi runs straight out of the box with LibreELEC and its surprising how well and easy it all is ... I was really happy.

But its just like owning this new Ferrari that was designed without a gearbox. Eventually you will want a manually driven car to have a gearbox. Its just not working out any other way.

I have been cross-compiling stuff since a week now, and I still got no browser running. Its just one dead end after another.

The chromium-elec docker doesn't work, because the amlogic build has the v3 kernel ... the way docker works is to pull in binaries from other distros (raspian), and you basically end up with just that, a giant 500MB static binary clobbered thing that you can run inside the existing OS ... but since xorg needs direct hardware access with zero isolation/virtualization involved, it also needs a certain degree of kernel compatibility for the driver. So that means I would need to either source a very very old distro with v3 kernel which only has extremely outdated browser versions ... or change the build to v4 kernel (Amlogic explicitly uses v3 .. I suppose that straight up breaks all kinds of things), or try my luck cross-compiling chromium from scratch ... which should take another week at least.

I have had it with compiling for now.

Let's go beloved Arch Linux ARM

Quote from chewitt

Yes this works (see the post from awiouy in response earlier where he confirms) but as you correctly suppose, you cannot have Kodi active and the other distro active at the same time else both fight over the same hardware resources. This is also the case with the current Chrome addon for x86/64 (X11) where Kodi needs to be stopped while it's active [...]

That seems a bit weird to me, since I can install Kodi on a regular Linux PC (like, Debian or something) and it will just run fine alongside all the other programs inside X11. I believe the same is true for Windows and Android versions.

I spent the last days (yes, days!) cross-compiling LibreELEC 9 RR with DISPLAYSERVER="x11", just like on x86, and now have xorg running with the fbdev driver. For Mali GPUs there is also an X11 driver with full DRI support and all that available, open source! Mali Drivers | Mali GPUs Linux EXA/DRI2 and X11 Display Drivers – Arm Developer . I will try that next. So far I made an X11 app run, and the colors are wrong and everything with the fbdev driver, too dark, no cursor only a square... gosh I hope the new driver fixes that.

Anyway, the problem now is that Kodi is not using X11 ... its still using fb0 directly. Why is that?

Isn't this the same kind of Kodi package as found on regular Distributions like Archlinux, etc? So why won't it simply open over x11?

What I am guessing now is, that the LibreELEC Kodi is different somehow and always using --standalone i.e. the framebuffer, even on x86, it never uses x11, but xorg only runs alongside idle. Then to render x86 apps properly, Kodi needs to stop using the framebuffer. Is that correct?

My goal here is really simple: Just to make Kodi run inside X11 like normal (on a desktop PC/distro), then maybe use fluxbox or something and bind F7 to open/close Chromium (which I also have to cross compile for another week ...). I am not sure if GLES2 will suffice to run Webassembly on the desktop version of chromium ... but that would be so great.

Then I can provide my SYSTEM file, with minimal instructions to install, for all Mali GPU-ed boxes. It will be awesome.

Quote from nooryani84

Get a Chromecast or an Nvidia Shield. Any browser that can give a remotely good experience will be external to Kodi.

My Box has no issues whatsoever running Chromium. Its just missing from LibreELEC, which is the big problem.

Just buying more and more stuff doesn't seem to be any kind of acceptable solution.

Quote from chewitt

LE has zero interest in supporting X11 on ARM hardware. In fact we're going to remove X11 from x86/64 hardware in the future too (which kills the current browser support there). So the remaining approach/solution which also works today is to run a browser like Chrome via docker. In essence you're going to run some kind of desktop distro (with X11 and the stuff it depends upon) in a container in the background. That probably doesn't do any favours for performance, but you get a working browser.

Before you ask, there is no nicely typed up guide on how to run a browser in a container. It's been done before though.

Are you really sure that this "docker solution" is actually working? Who did it actually, where is the evidence?

I never used docker, but its no magic thing you know. And its not even one bit intended for such purposes.

From my current knowledge and perspective, there is tons of reasons to believe why docker will just be a dead end. For example, that the regular docker can't do any hardware acceleration without direct forwarding to the host xorg server. Which I know for a fact.

Also I googled a bit and it seems to me docker in LibreELEC isn't even used for anything but background apps (or not?).

Thats how I just assume at this point, entirely contrary to what you said, that the Kodi docker service isn't even capable to graphical output, because Kodi renders directly to fb, and that docker in general can only do graphical output via standard methods (x11/wayland/maybe VNC like Qemu?). So that limits it to demon apps on ARM (or not? I am just guessing).

Plus, I don't want a browser to read text. I want to play videos, play audios, view pictures. Its a media box. (Yeah, guess I am not considering playing any of the thousands of free Webassembly games on itch.io at this point ...)

Suppose it all works and docker can run chromium, with the same speeds as qemu, its not usable at all in terms of media. Not even on a powerful machine. Maybe audio ... and text yes. But really its a media box. It should be able to access online media.

So ... I just read that X11/Xorg will be removed in LibreELEC 10, which means that it will kill browser support, i.e. the Chrome/Chromium plugin which is available on x86.

Firefox is now available with Wayland support. Is it possible to switch to Wayland?

Or is Wayland now basically as abadoned as X11? I.e. not supported or even not and never working if you tried to make your own LibreELEC build?

Maybe, but I am not using a Rasperry Pi but some high-powered Android TV box with busted internal flash memory.

At this point really, its doing everything I want it to do and quite nicely. Except for the browser of course. That is a really huge big giant gaping hole.

Nowadays its so vital to run a browser on a media box, I still am not sure what to do... Maybe run the android ROM entirely off the SD card if that is even possible.

As it is now with Kodi, sure you can provide plugins for some of the huge sites, like Youtube and Dailymotion. But there is still thousands of websites hosting videos and music off those sites that are rendered entirely inaccessibe. And that can never ever be fixed within some plugin mentality.

And that is only from a media sort of perspective. Just looking stuff up or reading books and websites without powering on the PC or fiddling with a smartphone. Using libreoffice to edit and print documents. Real downloads and file management. Webassembly and WebGL, HTML5 games. I am not expecting that much.

When you spent some $8 on a keyboard+touchpad remote, what is really keeping you from using normal websites?

Consider the "Pictures" feature of Kodi: Who really, downloads a bunch of Pictures onto their TV box, probably from their own Camera, to view the stuff they already have seen over and over in a row? What people really expect nowadays by "pictures" on a mediabox is really a feed from a site like Instagram or 9gag, where constantly new pictures show up to view something new and interesting. Its not an issue of Kodi or LibreELEC, that this really can only be done in a browser in any meaningful manner. Its an issue of providing a browser in lack of any sort of alternative option.

Regardless: Simply just, if I want to play some music off some site that doesn't happen to be Youtube (like Bandcamp, lots of stuff I like is on Bandcamp ...). Or play a video from someone's website. It just doesn't work. And that's just too much of "just doesn't work" all the time, if it comes to audio and video, for a media box.

So I am desperate, and still unsure what to do.

Can you theoretically flip some switches to compile X11/Xorg within a LibreELEC image on ARM, make Xorg the default and then compile Chromium as on x86 for Kodi?

I would believe it works ... but then probably I end up rewriting half the operating system because of weird shiet?

It would be nice, if someone clarified on this.

And its really this, or using my notebook half the time and then all the time for media stuff, throwing that TV out of the window eventually, probably. Its still nice for guests to have DVB-C running without watching IPTV from the smaller notebook screen wi... but for me personally?

Well sorry for bragging a lot, but I mean look at Chrome OS: its really just a browser and that is all you really need for a media device. Anything else is really not a primary feature. Yeah, Kodi has lots of Plugins to replace services that are usually provided by the browser ... but if it weren't for that? What would be left? Trading CD-ROMs and floppy drives, sort of. It doesn't fit the modern age.

Btw. I hooked up a DVD drive to my box and Kodi couldn't play virtually any of them. Most of them were standard VCDs (back in the days, the most used format, but now not supported at all ...) and the originals had too much DRM shiet going so Kodi didn't play. So much for offline usability. I am not saying, "yay use floppy drives again people", but please consider modern times and thus modern solutions.

Quote from CvH

There is no x11 at any our arm builds.

So none of the browsers are working. Shipping x11 is also no option.

A real fix is the browser implementation in kodi. This was started but not finished. Then everywhere kodi runs a browser would run too. Maybe kodi 19, maybe not.

I can code and do weird hacks.

But I haven't even looked at the internals of LibreELEC. From what I have read it renders directly to the framebuffer? So its not possible to run X11 with serious hardware acceleration at the same time?

Might it be possible to run it in X11 as a workaround, without really serious weeks of work involved?

The device I have has all the gigaquads you need, to not care about anything memory. I could even run Windows XP inside qemu on this thing.

But of course I can't install anything geared for the Pi since that would probably mean I could as well build Linux from scratch in terms of hardware compatibilities.

From what I gathered, running X11 would be a huge advantage to people. Since you could then just port all kinds of applications in a blink.

Quote from Klojum

I think you're missing the point of the whole LibreELEC/Kodi application.

If you want to do your social media during a video, use your smartphone.

Well, if it that's easy... Why didn't we think of that?!?

I call social media one of 21th century's addictions.

Raspbian has some Chrome/Chromium-type web browser.

I don't know if that was supposed to be funny.

So, I am kind of confounded how I can't find any sort of solution, no matter how far fetched or crazy, to the "missing browser" issue.

Is there really no viable web browser, or any kind of insane-ish workaround hack, to display normal modern websites like Youtube or Facebook?

Maybe some alpha buggy stuff? No?

How are people not tearing their hairs out over this?; considering how many other complicated big add-ons there are that work perfectly.

I mean, in principle the box is running Linux and its just a matter of cross-compiling enough stuff to make Firefox run - even if that's not a particularly clean thing to do. Hasn't someone done this, or anything really? Something? Please ... I can't really express how important a browser is to any kind of modern media device. We all should know this?

If nothing really works yet, then please which project in this direction is actively developed and promising and where to find it and help develop?

I have only found dead ends in this direction.

How can this be? What am I missing?