Wiki/Generic Userguide for OSMC

Hi there, I’m after a sort of wiki/generic userguide for OSMC so I can work stuff out for myself rather than post a million silly questions here. I am pretty much a total linux noob - I’ve dabbled here and there and I can follow a tutorial, but I don’t work with it day to day and so a lot of stuff obvious to the experienced passes me by. What I’d like is a sort of basic getting started guide that explains roughly what OSMC is, what it can/can’t do and really enough information to work out what information is relevant to me or what isn’t.

As an example, I followed the tutorial on htpcguides for getting sickrage up and running and all went swimmingly until I tried upstart. Of course, I subsequently worked out that was based on older versions of things and that OSMC is debian based and uses this sytem.d …thing…I guess of which I am vaguely aware but understand sod all about and that’s why it really didn’t like what I tried to do with upstart. Obviously, I’d have not made this error if I’d have clocked what version of debian this was based on, but this is after I re-installed again again and set up everything again. And then the RC came out. So, I’d rather not go through all that again if I can possibly avoid it.

If it helps, the exact thing I am trying to achieve is this:
Sickrage + couchpotato looking for stuff and passing them to a torrent client (deluge seems to work)
The ability to stop/start all of these with relative ease for when I want to do a bit of gaming.

For the second one, I am not averse to having to do that via SSH and a script of some description if it’s not manageable via kodi - I’ve got a droid phone so I’ve got a terminal client on there and if I want I can get my router setup to let me do it remotely.

I had it all setup and working it previously with a bit of googling, but had no idea how best to manage the starting/stopping of those various things and don’t really want to start again until I understand that whole process a bit better. I guess my question is - what is OSMC based on and what are my options for managing the startup and shutdown of these things remotely with the minimum of cocking around?

I apologise for the length of my post, but I hope that by telling you a bit about where I am with things and what I can/can’t do I make it easier to answer things quickly. If I do get it all working nicely then I am more than happy to document the whole thing for the benefit of other people who want to do the same thing.

Maybe I should have titled my post better then - ‘suggested additions to the wiki’. It covers some very basic stuff, but it doesn’t tell me anything I can use to work out how to do more stuff than is covered in the wiki. I think that if it told people what distro/version it was based on and approximately what is/isn’t present then I think that would be pretty helpful.

This isn’t me slating what the devs have done here - I like this a lot more than anything else I’ve tried on my pi, I’d just like a bit more information on what it is I am actually using so I’m wading through fewer google results.

1 Like

Now I understand.

You are after “How-to” guides for couchpotato, etc etc.

With OSMC still kinda in it’s infancy, to a certain extent, people are still working out why certain apps, programs etc etc are not functioning correctly.

As time goes on, and issues are spotted and resolved, the info that is on this forum will be collated and placed into a simple and easy set of guides and added to the wiki.

We, the community, are still exploring.
Use the search function to see if people are having similar issues, or projects, and you will find people doing the same thing and maybe even the answer to what you are looking for.

Thanks, that it is sort of it :slight_smile:

My assumption was that as it is based on a certain distro that said guides probably exist (to a greater or lesser extent) and that if I had a bit more to go on I might be able to work it out for myself.

I got sickbeard, cp and and deluge all working great in alpha4. The HTPCguides work great up until you use upstart as all you’re doing (from what I understand) is asking the repos that exist for an ARM compatible version of certain things and then grabbing the python stuff for sickrage and cp from guthub. That should all work ok (and does in A4) as it’s all cross-platform, but it’s the management of it that’s a bit of a mystery. I am guessing someone has done that on whatever fork/version OSMC is based on so maybe there information out there - I just don’t know what to ask google to find it, because as you rightly say this community is pretty new and no one has written anything specific yet.

But yes, thanks for clarifying my query a bit as I have a tendency to ramble. I’m a windows guy, so I know where to start there, but with anything linux based I don’t even really know what the right questions to ask are, let alone how to ask the machine said questions and I feel like knowing what OSMC was built on might help me a bit there.

As a complete aside though - the improvements between A4 and the RC are readily apparent and UI the general experience out of the box are both very slick and polished.

Yep, this would be super useful.

I know its doesn’t appeal to the typical software developer, but producing “how to” information is arguably more urgent than bug fixing - after all to the typical user there is no difference between a bug and doing something the wrong way from ignorance. Good “how to” information together with a list of known defects would avoid much of the user frustration evident, for example, in the Pi Tvheadend threads where it is not clear whether the OSMC team accept that there is a problem or not. Such an approach would also save the OSMC development team the time & effort associated with reading those threads.

1 Like

I agree with this thread. I tried OSMC then gave up because I couldn’t find a user guide and couldn’t work out how to use it. I’m a software engineer/programmer, I’ve used Raspbmc for years, so I’m not exactly a n00b or an idiot.

Documentation is critical.

Kodi is Kodi… What could you not do?