Egypt blocks osmc.tv (probably collateral damage while blocking loads of political news outlets). Currently using a VPN plugin on Firefox to write this here.
My question is can I install a VPN on OSMC itself so that I can update it?
I’m currently stuck on Kodi 19.1 on a RPi4
Thank you for your help.
Cheers
Yes you can install a VPN on OSMC itself using a VPN Manager for OpenVPN
Zomboided / service.vpn.manager
It supports several VPN providers
Thank you for the info.
Reading about it, it seems this is an addon to install inside Kodi itself.
Edit:
This is a Kodi addon that’s designed to make it easy to set up and manage VPN connections from within Kodi.
If that’s the case, then this would be specific to Kodi and probably won’t be of use to update OSMC itself. To update OSMC itself, I have to go to the OSMC menu which exits Kodi and thus won’t have access to any addon on Kodi.
Please corrct me if I’m wrong here.
Kodi already works fine with all the addons I have. My problem is that since 2021 when I first installed OSMC, the doamin osmc.tv got blocked. So now I can’t upgrade OSMC itself.
Addon works OSMC is supported,
Have been using this addon for several years and have not experienced any problems with updates
The add-on manages a VPN connection at the system level, not just Kodi.
Furthermore, you could probably just edit /etc/apt/sources.list and use an OSMC mirror directly instead.
Thank you both for your input.
I was just going with what’s written in the addon wiki:
Connect to VPN when Kodi starts; or before Kodi starts (LibreELEC only)
Further readig on the wiki, it seems OSMC doesn’t support OpenVPN natively and there are a couple of pacakes that need to be installed first (namely: openvpn and psmisc).
Not really familiar with linux, but there are enough instructions there to hopefully get me by.
Again thank you.
Thank you so much for the suggestion.
That would be actually amazing if any of the mirrors is not blocked and would solve the root of the problem instead of a workaround with VPN.
Where can I get a list of the available mirrors to try them out?
OpenVPN is installed by default for some time.
Oh, thank you for the info. It seems the wiki for that addon is outdated which makes me reluctant to follow it’s indtrustions.
About the OSMC mirrors that I can edit into the /etc/apt/sources.list file, I can’t seem to find a list in the wiki or the support forum. All I found was this page with instructions if I want to host a mirror:
This post about the content of the /etc/apt/sources.list file:
And searching directories, all I found was this server:
https://ftp.fau.de/osmc/osmc/
Is this an official mirror I can use?
Should I change this line in the /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://apt.osmc.tv buster main
to
Appreciate your help.
Thank you
Yes you could use that mirror. It may make distribution upgrades a bit problematic though
Thank you again for you reply.
The url display is changed in my previous reply, but it’s https :// ftp . fau . de / osmc / osmc / apt / (without the spaces).
Do I need to add the “buster main” part after the url or leave it out?
It may make distribution upgrades a bit problematic though
Not sure what you mean here, but could you please suggest any other mirror that would not have this drawback.
Thank you for your time.
Cheers
You would have to use the official mirrors for this to be OK or alternatively use a Bullseye installation
You need to use the full URL and you can verify with sudo apt-get update
Seaching for tis, it seems this is an older version of OSMC (~2022) and the whole reason I’m looking to upgrade is to get the latest version.
Anyway, I’ve actually downloaded the latest image (Dec 2023) and will install that on a new SDcard and make the changes in the sources.list file and see if it can connect and install addons from official Kodi repo.
I would still highly appreciate if you could link me a list of all official mirrors (if you know of one) so that I can try to switch to another mirror if I face problems.
Thank you for your help.
Cheers