Installing OSMC without installer

I bought the new raspberry pi 3 with integrated Wi-Fi. Currently I still have a Ethernet cable running through my living room to my old raspberry pi 1.

Just willing to download the last raspbmc version I figured that it was no more raspbmc but osmc which is basically the same but with much marketing around it. The most annoying one is that you need to install an install (such meta). I was pretty much sure it was not really necessary and moreover there is no version of the installer for Arch Linux.

So instead using their installer you can download directly the image (you need to click a button to display it) by selecting the right device and the last monthly version.

After the download just decompress the archive:

gunzip OSMC_TGT_rbp2_20160403.img.gz

Now you will need to know on which device is the sdcard. On Arch Linux with system d, you may use dmesg to have some info:

[  953.910932] mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address e624
[  953.973940] mmcblk0: mmc0:e624 SD04G 3.69 GiB
[  953.982627]  mmcblk0: p1 p2

On my own computer the sdcard is named mmcblk0 and have two partition p1 and p2. From there you just need to copy the image to your sdcard (be sure to remove the p1 or p2 if any, you need to write directly on the disk NOT on the partition):

dd if=OSMC_TGT_rbp2_20160403.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

Then put the sdcard back on the raspberry pi and OSMC will install itself on the device. Next it will prompt you with the home screen and guide you through the first install settings. You will need to set language, location, wireless password and so on.

If you need to connect to osmc, default username and password are:

username: osmc
password: osmc

If you need to add a SMB shared folder with authentication you will need to add the share normally, get the error and then directly connect to the OSMC with SSH and modify the XML file located at home/osmc/.kodi/userdata/sources.xml by adding the user and password as in the following:

<sources>
    ...
    <video>
        <default pathversion="1"></default>
        <source>
            <name>Prime</name>
            <path pathversion="1">smb://user:password@10.0.0.111/video/</path>
        </source>
    </video>
    ...
</sources>

Save, REBOOT, and it will work.