Howto create your own awesome SabayonPi MediaCenter

Download the Sabayon Linux MediaCenter image for the RPi:

Sabayon_Linux_16.06_armv7l_RPi_MediaCenter_8GB.img.xz

In this image all the tweaking was already done for you. There is no need to mess around with overclocking or whatever.

Insert your micro SD card in your PC and open up Gnome Disk Utility.

Windows users could try Rufus  to create the SD card. (…and Mac users can go to hell. They probably have enough money and already bought some very expensive Apple product that does the job…)

If your micro SD card is > 8gb then you might want to extend the rootfs partition on the sdcard to it makes use of all the space available. To do that you can open up Gparted or the KDE Partition editor program and simply resize the partition to max.

Insert the micro SD card in the RaspberryPi 3 and also attach it to the network with a cable connection. To be able to configure the Wifi network we first need to have the Pi connected to the wired network. Because the MediaCenter image always automatically loads kodi-raspberrypi.service with systemd, it is hard to get a shell on it and set things up. Remember that this image is designed to be a MediaCenter so it is supposed to only load up Kodi. (even if Kodi crashes or quits it will always try to reload Kodi!) Lucky thing for us, it also loads up ssh server when the system is booted! So let’s assume you figured out what IP the Raspberry Pi got from the DHCP server and connect to it. (In my case it’s 192.168.1.27)

ssh sabayon@192.168.1.27

(the password for the pre-configured user sabayon is: sabayon)

Now we have to become the root user, you do this by typing in the command ‘su’ followed by pressing the enter key.

(The password for root in this release is root)

Hooray! We are connected and feeling geeky, aren’t we? Well now let’s continue and configure the Wifi connection. The tool we use for this is nmcli. (NetworkManagerCommandLineInterface)

List available (non-hidden) Wifi networks:

# nmcli d wifi list
* SSID MODE CHAN RATE SIGNAL BARS SECURITY
Mancave Infra 1 54 Mbit/s 27 ▂___ —
my_home Infra 10 54 Mbit/s 54 ▂▄__ WPA1 WPA2
Playroom Infra 1 54 Mbit/s 30 ▂___ WPA1

Now we connect to the SSID called “my_home” using the password currywurst

# nmcli device wifi connect my_home password currywurst

Check if we are connected!

# nmcli d wifi list
* SSID MODE CHAN RATE SIGNAL BARS SECURITY
Mancave Infra 1 54 Mbit/s 27 ▂___ —
* my_home Infra 10 54 Mbit/s 54 ▂▄__ WPA1 WPA2
Playroom Infra 1 54 Mbit/s 30 ▂___ WPA1

Be sure to check what IP you are using on wlan0 (wireless) or eth0 (wired), we need this later to connect our phone:

# ip addr show

If you didn’t connect a mouse (and keyboard) to the RaspberryPi you should do this now so we can control the mouse pointer  and enable the build in webserver. This is important because we need to have this running to be able to connect with our Kodi phone app that we will later install on our phone. In Kodi you have to go into:

Settings → Services → Webserver → Allow control of Kodi via HTTP

You also might wanna enable a password there.

Now we are almost done, next thing to do is go in the Play Store on your phone and install Kore, Official Remote for Kodi.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.xbmc.kore

Start Kore on your phone, fill in the IP, username and password you configured and there you go! All done!

Bonus hint: https://www.google.nl/search?q=install+exodus+on+kodi