For a recent project, I needed to install LibreELEC/Kodi on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with built-in eMMC storage.

Because it's inconvenient to be swapping the Pi around from the embedded display I was using it in to my preferred carrier board I use for flashing Pis and interacting with their filesystems, I wanted to manage my LibreELEC install over SSH.

It seems like whatever documentation the LibreELEC Wiki used to have for remote SSH access is missing, and all I could find were vague references to enabling SSH during a GUI setup wizard. I don't remember seeing that.

But after many, many searches, I surmised it was possible to enable SSH by adding ssh to the end of the line in the system's cmdline.txt file, and rebooting. So I pulled the Pi, used usbboot to mount the fat32 volume on my Mac, and opened cmdline.txt and added ssh. Then I popped the Pi back in the embedded display, and started it up.

Sure enough, I could now SSH in:

The default user is root and the default password is libreelec. No wonder they don't have SSH enabled by default :P

Now, another thing I wanted to do was enable USB so I could plug a keyboard or flash drive into my embedded display. The CM4 doesn't enable the built-in USB 2.0 ports by default—or at least it didn't, historically.

But if I tried editing the /flash/config.txt file, it said it wasn't editable. Apparently the /flash directory is mounted read-only at boot, so I had to remount it as read-write.

Once I did that, I added dtoverlay=dwc2,dr_mode=host to enable USB 2.0 at the end of the /flash/config.txt file, and rebooted (reboot).

It's probably a good idea to change the default SSH password (passwd while logged in as root) while you're in there.

SSH can be useful for a number of things. Remote management, config backups, uploading/downloading files, and remote rebooting of your LibreELEC box, to name a few.