LibreELEC 9.0 Beta Pulls In Kodi 18, Core OS Improvements & New ARM Board Support

If you have some downtime during the holidays and looking to setup a Linux HTPC/multimedia system, the first beta of LibreELEC 9.0 is now available as the lightweight Linux distribution built around the Kodi HTPC media playback software that also has picked up Retroplayer gaming support and other recent features.

LibreELEC 9.0 Beta 1 pulls in the near-final release candidate of Kodi 18 and that alone means a lot on the end-user front with now having that Retroplayer game console emulator integration, Google Assistant support, the rewritten Wayland support, stability improvements, and tons of other additions.

At the OS-level, LibreELEC 9.0 Beta 1 finally adds changeable SSH passwords so there is no longer the hard-coded default, there is now default firewall configurations as part of their security increase, various user-interface improvements, and also a safe mode boot when Kodi experiences problems starting up.

Kodi 9.0 Beta 1 also has preliminary support for Rockchip SoCs with initial support for the ASUS Tinker Board, Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC, PINE64 ROCK64/RockPro64, and others. The Amlogic-based Libre Computer Le Potato is also now supported.

More details and download links for the initial beta of LibreELEC 9.0 can be found via libreelec.tv.