Posts by chewitt

    Spielmops If the box has Android (WeOS) still installed then you must configure and boot with the "box" image. Once booted into the box image you can download the "wetek-play2" image to /storage and overwrite Android with emmctool to run LE from emmc if you like. I do suggest you try the image from an SD card first before overwriting Android as there are feature/function differences between the old vendor kernel imag and AMLGX and it won't meet everyone's requirements.

    There is no such thing as a "stuck" screen, only GPUs that are perhaps no longer supported (or loading the wrong driver) and thus never overwrite the boot splash with Kodi. You should still be able to SSH into the box and run "pastekodi" to share a URL so we can see what's wrong or not working.

    NB: LE does not (and never will) guarantee to support all hardware. It's nice if things can keep going, but if older hardware doesn't align with our long-term technical direction and desire to keep the distro simple, we aren't going to bend over backwards to support it.

    LE is using the default libc resolver and this caches records according to their TTL values so I doubt caching is the issue. I'd make an educated guess that Kodi makes some form of discovery request which is being denied or sinkholed by Pi Hole and so the request is being repeated (ad infinitum) hoping to get a response (which never comes). There is probably something in Kodi that could have better failure logic. In the same breath Pi Hole improvement to not break the world's most popular mediacentre app would be a good thing too. The decision to use Pi Hole also makes it a self-inflicted problem, sort of, so both sets of developers will probably point fingers at the other.

    More verbose logging from Pi Hole and/or perhaps a PCAP of the traffic to look at would be useful.

    I'm able to use SSH from PowerShell on a Win11 Pro (arm) VM under vmware Fusion so I assume it can/should work from the x86_64 version too. Please ensure that you didn't enable the 'disable password auth' (allow only key-auth) option in LE settings, because this is confusingly worded and will not stop the box from prompting for a password; but does prevent password auth from ever working. Assuming that wasn't the issue, install PuTTY and use that instead.

    FileZilla copies files. It is not an SSH client. Use PuTTY.

    This shows older Kodi GUI but the process is the same:

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    Cold boot with the box connected to the TV and then run "getedid create" from the SSH console. It will capture the EDID data from the HDMI connection and then hardcode the HDMI connector to use it so the box sees the TV as always-on/always-connected. Then it shouldn't make any difference if the TV is turned off/on again.

    I have no knowledge of these mini Beelink devices, but whereas CEC is native on most ARM SoC boxes (aimed at the Android STB market) most x86_64 devices (aimed at Desktop Windows users) don't natively support CEC control over HDMI.

    Add "textmode" to boot params in syslinux.cfg and the OS is forced to boot to a local console instead of Kodi. This allows you to connect a USB keyboard to poke around a look at the system log with "dmesg" .. which will probably reveal the box can see the SDIO module but is missing a firmware and nvram config file to make it work.

    The missing files should be in this repo: https://github.com/LibreELEC/brcmfmac_sdio-firmware/ but you'll need to download it on another machine and copy it to the root folder of the USB stick, then boot the box into textmode and copy the files to the /storage/.config/firmware/brcm/ folder before rebooting. On reboot the firmware will appear in /usr/lib/firmware and the card should work.

    If you confirm that fixes it, we'll have a think about how to resolve things properly in the normal image.

    Fake RAM size isn't uncommon but it's rare to see 512MB configurations outside of industrial boards, even on older platforms like Meson8. I'd guess you still have the wrong boot ROM for the box and the RAM configuration in early boot code means it's only seeing 1 bank of RAM, and the second (missing) will add another 512MB to give a more normal 1GB.

    Then again; this is an era where all kinds of shady manufacturing has been done. If it works and doesn't cause problems; don't fix it :)