• Raspberry Pi 3
• Powered USB hub
• USB hard disk 1 Tb
• USB audio adapter
• Joystick controller
• LCD display 16×2 charaters

We started with a Raspbian 2017-11-29 lite, based on Debian Stretch. To have a minimal Kodi installation and support for the joystick, just install the following packages:

• kodi
• kodi-bin
• kodi-peripheral-joystick

Kodi will not start automatically at boot, just execute kodi-standalone from the command line.

NOTICE: Raspbian includes Kodi version 17.6 whereas Debian Stretch has Kodi 17.1, so beware of what packages you are installing and respect the right dependencies.

There are several recipes on the internet to start Kodi on boot; we searched one with the following features:

• Does not require xserver.xorg, as we have installed Raspbian Stretch Lite.
• Run Kodi as unprivileged user.
• Run as a service, do not use autologin and autostart tricks.
• Should be compliant with the underlying init system, which is systemd in Raspbian Stretch.
• Can perform reboot and poweroff from Kodi menu.

So we want to execute kodi-standalone as kodi user, create that user first and assign it to the required groups:

adduser --disabled-password --gecos "User to run Kodi Media Center" kodi
adduser kodi audio
adduser kodi video
adduser kodi plugdev
adduser kodi input

Then we created a systemd unit file /etc/systemd/system/kodi.service to start Kodi as a service. Please do not use an old fashioned sysvinit start/stop script (e.g. /etc/init.d/kodi), because the new systemd can use it only in compatibility mode.

The first attempt was an Amazon Basics USB 3.0 4 ports hub. Unfortunately it is based on the VIA Labs chips, which seems to have a bug, so it is uncompatibile with the Raspberry Pi.

The device is listed on the USB bus:

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 2109:2811 VIA Labs, Inc. Hub

but when you connect even a simple mouse, you get plenty of errors, and the device does not work:

usb 1-1.4.1: new low-speed USB device number 6 using dwc_otg
usb 1-1.4.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: new low-speed USB device number 7 using dwc_otg
usb 1-1.4.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: new low-speed USB device number 8 using dwc_otg
usb 1-1.4.1: device not accepting address 8, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: new low-speed USB device number 9 using dwc_otg
usb 1-1.4.1: device not accepting address 9, error -71
usb 1-1.4-port1: unable to enumerate USB device

I tried several workarounds: leaving the hub unpowered, attaching an USB 3.0 external hard disk, adding the option dwc_otg.speed=1 into /boot/cmdline.txt. None of that gave a minimal benefit. I returned the hub back to Amazon.

Here are some web references:

• USB 3.0 hub fails to pass through USB 2.0 devices (ID 2109:3431)
• AmazonBasics 4 Port USB 3.0 Hub not working
• documentation > hardware > raspberrypi > usb
• RPi Powered USB Hubs