Posts by garydale

  • Raspberry Pi and an external SSD - best practices

    This question may seem a little basic but I haven't found a good answer for it yet. LibreELEC is just enough Linux to run Kodi but it is a strange beast compared to the Linux installs I'm used to. In particular, running on device that uses a partitioned SD card as primary storage is not something you see often.

    Using df -h, I note that /storage mounts to the second, larger partition. This suggests that its where all the media goes, although I haven't found how it is identified to be mounted there.

    I did see mention of cmdline.txt in some posts, which I gather is the file in /flash (that requires remounting to be able to change). Fortunately LibreELEC includes lsblk so I could replace the UUID for "disk=" with the one for the formatted partition on my external SSD. Since it doesn't include rsync, I used cp -a to copy the files from /storage to my SSD, which automounted under /var/media. A reboot and everything is working. df -h confirms that the external SSD is indeed mounted as /storage.

    I also note that now the larger SD partition mounts under /var/media. At some point I could get used to parted's commands to remove it, I suppose, and expand the main to partition to far more space than it will probably ever use. However it seems like it could also be used for other distros. However I don't know enough about the Raspberry Pi boot loader to know if this is even possible. Another option would be to use is the /storage/backup directory, but I don't know how to do that when the system doesn't seem to use /etc/fstab.

    Anyway, at this point LibreELEC seems to be set up the way I want. I'm not sure if this is considered a "best practice" for a Pi installation, but it seems reasonable. Can anyone add in things that I should do/have done differently?

  • Really old hardware & overscan

    I've installed LibreELEC on my Pi4 and have been slowly getting it configured to be useful. One thing that is causing me a lot of problems is that my TV is around 20 years old. It's a very nice flatscreen HDTV but it doesn't show all 1920x1080 pixels. It has the old analogue TV overscan that I can't seem to remove (that convinced me to switch to LibreELEC from RaspberryPi OS running Kodi).

    For watching TV, this isn't a problem but for a computer is it a huge issue because the menu/launchers are usually around the edge of the screen, in the overscan area.

    I've been trying out various skins to get around this but haven't found any that I really like. The trouble is that it takes time to download and install them only to find that you can't see the menus and (worse) can't find a way to change the skin.

    Can anyone recommend a skin that:
    1) give access to all the options
    2) stays away from the 4 edges of the screen?

    Thanks

  • 1080i output

    I have an RPi4 that I have been struggling with for some time. My TV is 1080i. I'm running Raspian currently.

    I can boot into the Pi and manually set it to 1080i but then I can't do anything about the overscan. Weeks of trying have left me frustrated. Raspian has its own config tools that make it difficult to use normal Linux configuration advice yet are apparently not adequate to let me output a perfectly normal TV signal to my TV.

    I recently learned of LibreElec which seems geared to doing exactly what I want my Pi to do - serve as a SmartTV controller. However, before I give it a try, I'd like to know if it is any better at outputting 1080i than Raspian.

    Thanks for any advice you can provide.