Howto Install LibreELEC

LibreELEC is running on external medias(SD card or U-disk), so you need to write the image to SD/USB storage.

Preperations

  • [x] Download the Win32DiskImager.
  • [x] Extract and install it on your Windows PC.
  • [x] A SD card and a card reader or a U-disk is required, make sure there’s nothing important on your card as ALL the data will be wiped out after the following operations.

Download the LibreELEC image

You can download LibreELEC images from firmware page.
Note: Image contains KVIM is image for VIM1, and KVIM2 is for VIM2.

Write image to SD/USB storage

There are two ways to write LibreELEC image to SD/USB storage:

On Windows PC

  1. Run Win32DiskImager.
  2. Insert the SD/USB storage into your PC, it should appear as a new drive letter
  3. Select the image file and verify the destination drive letter is correct, then click write:
    Image of Win32DiskImagerLibreELEC.jpg
  4. When write process completed you can safely remove the SD/USB storage by right clicking on the drive in Windows explorer and selecting eject.

On Linux

Get the device node of SD/USB storage:
After you’ve inserted the TF card to your PC, use dmesg | tail to find out what /dev/sdX it is.
You can also use parted or fdisk, It should be something like /dev/sdX:

$ sudo parted -l
...
Model: Mass Storage Device (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 3997MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      16.5MB  3989MB  3973MB  primary  fat32        boot

Make sure the disk is unmounted:

$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1

Use dd to write the disk image into SD/USB storage:

sudo dd if=LibreELEC-S905_SD_USB.aarch64-17.6_20180122-KVIM.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M && sync

Notice: sync is ensure the changes are synced to the SD/USB storage before removing it.

Eject the SD/USB storage:

$ sudo eject /dev/sdb

Boot LibreELEC from the SD/USB storage

In order to boot from SD/USB storage, you need Android running on eMMC and activate the multi-boot.

Two ways to activate the multi-boot:

1). Via Keys mode
2). Activate multi-boot via Android.

  • Enter Settings>About Device->System->updates
  • Click select and choose aml_autosript.zip
  • Click update, then the system will reboot and boot to external media image
    Note: Don’t use PC USB host to supply the power, or will fail to activate multi-boot!

NOTICE

  • For previous Android N has permission issue, you can’t use it to boot your external media image, or your booting card will be broken.
  • For Android O also has permission issue. If you want to boot Ubuntu with linux 4.9 please refer to this reply.