A snap of Kodi, the hugely popular open-source media center software, is available for testing.

Announcing the snap package on the Kodi forum, Kodi team member ‘DaVu‘ explains that with “more snap packages are available for Ubuntu-based systems” they are “happy to provide a Kodi snap package as well.”

“Note, that this is in a pretty early state and things might not work as expected. But feel free to report if you find something.”

The Kodi snap is available in the –edge channel (edge as in bleeding edge as in unstable).

If you plan on taking the snap for a spin be sure to report any successes, failures, and/or dead chickens over on the Kodi forum.

Install Kodi snap app on Ubuntu

To install Kodi 18 Alpha 1 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (and, presumably, other snap-supporting Linux distributions) you just need to run the following command:

snap install kodi --edge

Things should work as expected, but if they don’t you may need to manually connect the various snap ‘interfaces’ to Kodi.

Do this by running:

for PERM in alsa avahi-observe hardware-observe locale-control mount-observe network-observe removable-media shutdown system-observe; do sudo snap connect kodi:${PERM}; done

You can then run Kodi from the command line:

snap run kodi

Not being a Kodi user I can’t tell you what’s working and what isn’t as I’ve no experience with the app normally. The Kodi home directory is stored in ~/snap/kodi .

A few “known” limitations copied over from the forum thread:“You can’t browse anything outside ~/snap/kodi. So if you are using system mounts, the mountpoint has to be inside Kodis snap home directory. The normal NFS mounts inside Kodi (add-source->browse->network file system – for example) works. But if there’s something mounted in /media, you won’t be able to access it. So please mount your system mounts to Kodis home directory as well if you are using smb or nfs shares.”

If you find the snap app a bit too raw for your tastes you can, as always, install the latest Kodi release on Ubuntu from the official Kodi PPA.