[rukusx7]

In my standalone OpenELEC setup, I have had success with the following peripherals:
HP wired mouse
HP wired keyboard
USB wireless Tronsmart TSM-01 air mouse
Samsung TV wireless USB adapter
Transcend 760 16gb USB flash drive
Sandisk Cruzer mirco 8GB flash drive
Western Digital mybook 1150 2TB (which its worth to mention, does not (always) return from its own suspend state when the chromebox is woken from suspend.)
Samsung LED TV UN46d6300

Also want to mention that if you use visualization when playing music, I've noticed that FishBMC and GOOM result in high CPU usage. ProjectM (although looks more intensive) uses the least CPU and possibly makes more use of the GPU. I'm not sure.

If anyone know of a linux distro they can recommend that suits our chipset/device, please let me know. I'd like something where its not necessary for me to manually update the kernel to keep up with latest stable kernel. Linux mint lost points because of this.

This was posted within OpenELEC with chromium-browser.

[hdmkv]

I used Matt's tool and set-up standalone OpenELEC w/o ever using ChromeOS and setting the clock. Now XBMC shows the wrong time... anyone know how I can set the clock?

[Matt Devo]

I used Matt's tool and set-up standalone OpenELEC w/o ever using ChromeOS and setting the clock. Now XBMC shows the wrong time... anyone know how I can set the clock?

You need to set the country and timezone under Settings -> Appearance IIRC

[Matt Devo]

Well, took Matt Devo's advice from the XBMC forum linked above. My TV wasn't synching up fast enough and when I hit CTRL-D from the moment I turned on the Chromebox, instead of waiting for the display, it got me into the OS far enough that I could CTRL-SHFT-F2. Anyway, followed his guide from there and got stuck again, even worse this time.

Anyway, after messing with 4 different flash drives, I finally stuck the bootable OpenELEC on a MicroSD card with adapter. I discovered that if I stuck that MicroSD card in along with the Chrome OS recovery image on Flash Drive and then booted with the paper clip in the reset hole then I had about 2 seconds to hit the ESC button and get the list of 3 bootable choices. I was able to then install from the SD card. This time it took.

for the original flash drive you tested, did you create the OpenELEC install media using the script, or did you run OE's USB creator tool? The latter, under Windows, doesn't re-partition the drive, which can create problems if there's a small hidden partition in front of the larger/bootable/FAT32 one.

To be clear, with the Coreboot firmware installed, the recovery button has absolutely no function (which is why you have to re-flash your original firmware before restoring ChromeOS). And if there is more than 1 bootable device connected (ie, any USB or SD devices), you will have 5 seconds to hit ESC before it automatically boots the internal HDD.

Boots right into XBMC from the HDD and is running really smooth. For some reason the box just wouldn't recognize any of the flash drives as bootable. I must have not set up the boot configuration very well. I don't know. I could have sworn that I checked and double checked along the way.

Anyway, pretty pleased so far. I have a FLIRC as the IR receiver paired with my Logitech Harmony and I still need to get the delay settings correct, there's some pretty bad lag, but I should be able to get ironed out.

Thanks for the help.

If you have USB flash drives which are not detected by the SeaBIOS boot menu (which is different than being detected, but not booting from it), then please PM me so I can walk you thru getting me the firmware boot log and I can see what's going on. And be sure to let me know the date stamp in the SeaBIOS version string on the boot menu.

[Igor2014]

In my standalone OpenELEC setup, I have had success with the following peripherals:
HP wired mouse
HP wired keyboard
USB wireless Tronsmart TSM-01 air mouse
Samsung TV wireless USB adapter
Transcend 760 16gb USB flash drive
Sandisk Cruzer mirco 8GB flash drive
Western Digital mybook 1150 2TB (which its worth to mention, does not (always) return from its own suspend state when the chromebox is woken from suspend.)
Samsung LED TV UN46d6300

Also want to mention that if you use visualization when playing music, I've noticed that FishBMC and GOOM result in high CPU usage. ProjectM (although looks more intensive) uses the least CPU and possibly makes more use of the GPU. I'm not sure.

If anyone know of a linux distro they can recommend that suits our chipset/device, please let me know. I'd like something where its not necessary for me to manually update the kernel to keep up with latest stable kernel. Linux mint lost points because of this.

This was posted within OpenELEC with chromium-browser.

I would suggest Fedora 20 (I'm using KDE Spin + Openbox/XBMC). I tested various linux distros and Fedora was the most stable for me. Also it boots faster than any other distro (including OpenELEC). I'm running XBMC in Openbox (using autostart on boot) and while it uses a little more memory (11% vs 5% for OpenELEC) it allows me to run Steam & Chromium from inside XBMC without headaches. Also many Steam games run quite well on celeron. Tested with DOTA2, HL2:EP2, DofD & TF2.

[Matt Devo]

If anyone know of a linux distro they can recommend that suits our chipset/device, please let me know. I'd like something where its not necessary for me to manually update the kernel to keep up with latest stable kernel. Linux mint lost points because of this.

what are you trying to do that OpenELEC isn't sufficient?

I would suggest Fedora 20 (I'm using KDE Spin + Openbox/XBMC). I tested various linux distros and Fedora was the most stable for me. Also it boots faster than any other distro (including OpenELEC). I'm running XBMC in Openbox (using autostart on boot) and while it uses a little more memory (11% vs 5% for OpenELEC) it allows me to run Steam & Chromium from inside XBMC without headaches. Also many Steam games run quite well on celeron. Tested with DOTA2, HL2:EP2, DofD & TF2.

Fedora + OpenBox + XBMC boots in <5 seconds? b/c that's what OpenELEC is at.

I think OE is ideal for people who want a dedicated XBMC appliance with little more. Anything else (eg, Steam) is going to require a more full fledged distro, and I think right now Fedora is the best for the Haswell platform. Not sure it meets rukusx7's requirement for automatic? kernel updates though

[hdmkv]

Matt, if I want to update to v2.11 of your tool from having used v2.10 and installed OpenELEC standalone, how would I go about this?

[Matt Devo]

Matt, if I want to update to v2.11 of your tool from having used v2.10 and installed OpenELEC standalone, how would I go about this?

what exactly do you want to update? OE updates are handled by OE, just turn on the auto updates in OE general settings.

If you're looking to update the Coreboot firmware, then simply boot a ChromiumOS USB stick and re-download/re-run the script from there. Though the only change from the 20140613 firmware to 20140620 is the disabling of the TPM module, which doesn't affect OE (unlike other Linux distros)

[Igor2014]

I would suggest Fedora 20 (I'm using KDE Spin + Openbox/XBMC). I tested various linux distros and Fedora was the most stable for me. Also it boots faster than any other distro (including OpenELEC). I'm running XBMC in Openbox (using autostart on boot) and while it uses a little more memory (11% vs 5% for OpenELEC) it allows me to run Steam & Chromium from inside XBMC without headaches. Also many Steam games run quite well on celeron. Tested with DOTA2, HL2:EP2, DofD & TF2.

Fedora + OpenBox + XBMC boots in <5 seconds? b/c that's what OpenELEC is at.

I think OE is ideal for people who want a dedicated XBMC appliance with little more. Anything else (eg, Steam) is going to require a more full fledged distro, and I think right now Fedora is the best for the Haswell platform. Not sure it meets rukusx7's requirement for automatic? kernel updates though

It boots into openbox + XBMC in around 8-10 seconds. Strangely, for OpenELEC it took longer to boot, around 20-30 seconds (maybe because of tpm issue). Anyway the first thing I tried once I rooted chromebox was OpenELEC. I was expecting trouble-free experience but unfortunately it was not the case. The most notable issue was that it refused to download video-addons (while other addons it downloaded successfully). I was searching over internet for possible solution, but then gave up and decided to try other distros. Ubuntu + XBMC didn't work for me because of a lot of hangs and freezes during playback and menu navigation. Mint has a problem with mounting my external NTFS formated drives + many other issues. As for now Fedora is the most trouble-free distro for me. Not to mention that Ubuntu and Fedora are the only distros officialy supported by Intel Linux Drivers Team. And it seems they are going to drop Ubuntu soon as they stated they are not going to support Mir and will stay committed to Wayland only.

[Matt Devo]

It boots into openbox + XBMC in around 8-10 seconds. Strangely, for OpenELEC it took longer to boot, around 20-30 seconds (maybe because of tpm issue). Anyway the first thing I tried once I rooted chromebox was OpenELEC. I was expecting trouble-free experience but unfortunately it was not the case. The most notable issue was that it refused to download video-addons (while other addons it downloaded successfully). I was searching over internet for possible solution, but then gave up and decided to try other distros. Ubuntu + XBMC didn't work for me because of a lot of hangs and freezes during playback and menu navigation. Mint has a problem with mounting my external NTFS formated drives + many other issues. As for now Fedora is the most trouble-free distro for me. Not to mention that Ubuntu and Fedora are the only distros officialy supported by Intel Linux Drivers Team. And it seems they are going to drop Ubuntu soon as they stated they are not going to support Mir and will stay committed to Wayland only.

sounds like something was awry with your OE install, I've had no issues with video add-ons, and it's booted in ~5s since the first Coreboot firmware I released (2014-05-18).

I may give your setup a whirl though, as I like the idea of having Steam and Chromium integrated as well. How do you have it set up to switch between XBMC, Steam, and Chromium?

[Igor2014]

sounds like something was awry with your OE install, I've had no issues with video add-ons, and it's booted in ~5s since the first Coreboot firmware I released (2014-05-18).

I may give your setup a whirl though, as I like the idea of having Steam and Chromium integrated as well. How do you have it set up to switch between XBMC, Steam, and Chromium?

I'm using Advanced Launcher for XBMC to start Steam and Chromium.
(--kiosk option to start Chromium in full screen mode, Alt+F4 to close it and get back to XBMC)
(-bigpicture option to start Steam in full screen mode.)

[Matt Devo]

I'm using Advanced Launcher for XBMC to start Steam and Chromium.
(--kiosk option to start Chromium in full screen mode, Alt+F4 to close it and get back to XBMC)
(-bigpicture option to start Steam in full screen mode.)

cool, thx. Any reason to use the KDE Fedora spin vs something more lightweight, like xfce or lxde?

[Igor2014]

I'm using Advanced Launcher for XBMC to start Steam and Chromium.
(--kiosk option to start Chromium in full screen mode, Alt+F4 to close it and get back to XBMC)
(-bigpicture option to start Steam in full screen mode.)

cool, thx. Any reason to use the KDE Fedora spin vs something more lightweight, like xfce or lxde?

I installed KDE, than installed openbox (very light weight windows manager), created xbmc user and configured autologin of this user into openbox with autostart of xbmc.

[furii]

@ igor2014 & matt

re: installing video addons, i too have encountered this problem on a fresh 4.0.5 OE install. i had assumed it was an OE issue that would be fixed in the next release but maybe not. from my log:

Code:

21:03:10 T:139893659109184   DEBUG: ------ Window Deinit () ------
21:03:13 T:139893659109184   DEBUG: Keyboard: scancode: 0x24, sym: 0x000d, unicode: 0x000d, modifier: 0x0
21:03:13 T:139893659109184   DEBUG: OnKey: return (0xf00d) pressed, action is Select
21:03:13 T:139893659109184   DEBUG: CFileCache::Open - opening <addons/frodo/plugin.video.youtube/plugin.video.youtube-4.4.8.zip.md5> using cache
21:03:13 T:139893659109184   DEBUG: CurlFile::Open(0x758e530) http://mirrors.xbmc.org/addons/frodo/plugin.video.youtube/plugin.video.youtube-4.4.8.zip.md5
21:03:13 T:139892323550976  NOTICE: Thread FileCache start, auto delete: false
21:03:13 T:139892323550976    INFO: CFileCache::Process - Hit eof.
21:03:13 T:139892323550976   DEBUG: Thread FileCache 139892323550976 terminating
21:03:13 T:139893659109184   DEBUG: ------ Window Deinit (DialogAddonInfo.xml) ------
21:03:13 T:139892262188800   DEBUG: FileManager: copy http://mirrors.xbmc.org/addons/frodo/plugin.video.youtube/plugin.video.youtube-4.4.8.zip -> special://home/addons/packages/plugin.video.youtube-4.4.8.zip
21:03:13 T:139892262188800   DEBUG: CurlFile::Open(0x7f3b5a3e8be0) http://mirrors.xbmc.org/addons/frodo/plugin.video.youtube/plugin.video.youtube-4.4.8.zip
21:03:14 T:139892262188800   ERROR: CCurlFile::FillBuffer - Failed: HTTP response code said error(22)
21:03:14 T:139892262188800  NOTICE: CCurlFile::FillBuffer - Reconnect, (re)try 1
21:03:14 T:139892262188800   ERROR: CCurlFile::FillBuffer - Failed: HTTP response code said error(22)
21:03:14 T:139892262188800   ERROR: CCurlFile::CReadState::Connect, didn't get any data from stream.
21:03:14 T:139892262188800   ERROR: DeleteFile - cant delete file </storage/.xbmc/addons/packages/plugin.video.youtube-4.4.8.zip>. trying lower case </storage/.xbmc/addons/packages/plugin.video.youtube-4.4.8.zip>
21:03:14 T:139893659109184   DEBUG: CGUIMediaWindow::GetDirectory (addons://all/xbmc.addon.video)
21:03:14 T:139893659109184   DEBUG:   ParentPath = [addons://all/xbmc.addon.video]
21:03:14 T:139892323550976  NOTICE: Thread BackgroundLoader start, auto delete: false
21:03:14 T:139893045454592    INFO: easy_aquire - Created session to http://mirrors.xbmc.org
21:03:14 T:139892323550976    INFO: Previous line repeats 2 times.
21:03:14 T:139892323550976   DEBUG: Thread BackgroundLoader 139892323550976 terminating

so it looks like it might be an issue with xbmc or their mirrors. not sure why it's looking for an frodo addon rather than gotham but maybe they all serve from the same location.

edit: after a little more digging i'm not seeing the youtube plugin on any of the xbmc mirrors listed for the US so it's definitely not an OE issue.

double edit: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=198324

[smitbret]

Well, took Matt Devo's advice from the XBMC forum linked above. My TV wasn't synching up fast enough and when I hit CTRL-D from the moment I turned on the Chromebox, instead of waiting for the display, it got me into the OS far enough that I could CTRL-SHFT-F2. Anyway, followed his guide from there and got stuck again, even worse this time.

Anyway, after messing with 4 different flash drives, I finally stuck the bootable OpenELEC on a MicroSD card with adapter. I discovered that if I stuck that MicroSD card in along with the Chrome OS recovery image on Flash Drive and then booted with the paper clip in the reset hole then I had about 2 seconds to hit the ESC button and get the list of 3 bootable choices. I was able to then install from the SD card. This time it took.

for the original flash drive you tested, did you create the OpenELEC install media using the script, or did you run OE's USB creator tool? The latter, under Windows, doesn't re-partition the drive, which can create problems if there's a small hidden partition in front of the larger/bootable/FAT32 one.

To be clear, with the Coreboot firmware installed, the recovery button has absolutely no function (which is why you have to re-flash your original firmware before restoring ChromeOS). And if there is more than 1 bootable device connected (ie, any USB or SD devices), you will have 5 seconds to hit ESC before it automatically boots the internal HDD.

Boots right into XBMC from the HDD and is running really smooth. For some reason the box just wouldn't recognize any of the flash drives as bootable. I must have not set up the boot configuration very well. I don't know. I could have sworn that I checked and double checked along the way.

Anyway, pretty pleased so far. I have a FLIRC as the IR receiver paired with my Logitech Harmony and I still need to get the delay settings correct, there's some pretty bad lag, but I should be able to get ironed out.

Thanks for the help.

If you have USB flash drives which are not detected by the SeaBIOS boot menu (which is different than being detected, but not booting from it), then please PM me so I can walk you thru getting me the firmware boot log and I can see what's going on. And be sure to let me know the date stamp in the SeaBIOS version string on the boot menu.

I hope I can answer everything the way you'd find useful.

I originally tried to install OpenELEC, following this guide: http://geekfreely.blogspot.com/2014/...chromebox.html

Per those instructions, you do some CMD Line changes to boot from USB & Legacy. That went fine and I went through and installed the OpenELEC image from USB but it didn't "take". I had installed the image according to directions from that site, using Win32 Disk imager. At that point, the Chromebox would only let me get into the ChromeOS Recovery Screen by sticking the Paper Clip in the reset button while turning the Chromebox on. I could still perform a Chrome OS recovery at this point but it would never actually repair anything and upon reboot I would be in the exact same situation. I would end up on a screen that said:

Booting from Hard Disk
Early console in decompress_kernel
KASLR using RDRAND

Decompressing Linux....Parsing ELF...Performing Relocations..done
Booting the kernel

Any method of rebooting the box (except Paper Clip in the reset button) would just get me to that BIOS screen that ignored keyboard commands like ESC or CTRL-<whatever> and just stalled out at <Booting the kernel> with no option to change the boot device and would not respond to any keyboard commands.

That's how I ended up not able to get past anything until you recommended hitting CTRL-D as soon as things started up. That got me back into the Chrome Screen where I could hit CTRL-SHFT-F2 and follow your process for installing OpenELEC. However, I shortcutted by using my existing USB image of OpenELEC that I had created from the previous guide instead of following your shortcut on screen. Once again, it appeared to install, but upon reboot, it was back to the same BIOS screens that just stalled out at Booting Kernel. That really locked me up to where I couldn't even get to the ChromeOS Recovery screen at all. There were a couple of occasions where I managed to get the menu to choose my bootable source, but any drive I chose would just say it was an unbootable source. Those opportunities were few and far between (every 10 tries or so) and I couldn't tell you what combination of activities and key presses got me to that point.

Finally, I installed a bootable image to a MicroSD card in an SD adapter (Using Win32 Disk Imager) using the original OpenELEC image. By itself, it did nothing. But then I stuck the ChromeOS recovery flash drive AND the OpenELEC flash drive AND the OpenELEC image on SD into the Chromebox. That got me the 3-5 seconds to hit ESC and got me into the menu to choose my Boot Choice. I was able to install OpenELEC from the SD card at that point and everything has been working great since. Boots up great from the SSD and things have been smooth sailing since I got my Harmony Remote + FLIRC combo working with XBMC.

If there's some add'l info I can provide, I'd be happy to try to get it, but keep in mind I do not have any measurable experience with computers outside of Windows and basic Home Networking.

****Oops, just noticed you asked for a PM. I'll send this same info, there.*****