[mythtv-users] AppleTV with Linux

[Peter Loron]

On Mar 11, 2008, at 9:39 AM, Scott D. Davilla wrote:

> An update on atv-bootloader (http://code.google.com/p/atv- 
> bootloader/);
>
> I've svn committed the source and binaries. It's still a work in
> progress but the main components to enabled booting the AppleTV to a
> initramfs command-line environment are present. kexec is present and
> one can manually kexec boot a secondary linux kernel/distro. vesafb
> (as well as patched imac_fb and efifb) console framebuffer is working
> so one does not require a patched kernel to boot anymore.
>
> The initramfs is glibc based not uclibc so it's easy to add
> additional support apps. It's built from a MythBuntu 7.10 distro. A
> patched parted and hfs-tools are also present so you can use this to
> create proper AppleTV recovery gpt partitions.
>
> To solve the chick-or-egg issue in initially creating the recovery
> partition for the bootloader, the patched parted and install script
> are posted as a separate download. dd does not work reliably with USB
> pen drives (sector format difference issues) and gpt also can have
> issues so a disk image for dd usage will not be created, you will
> have to create the gpt format/partitions from parted. But that's
> pretty easy. Then "cp -arp" the required files over.
>
> Also last night I completed a boot config parser. It can parse grub,
> kboot, syslinux, isolinux and mb_boot_tv config files, extract and
> reformat the default boot params into a kexec load string  -- just
> need to add device/partition scanning and soon -- auto boot. This and
> the initramfs make script will be svn committed in a few days.
>
> I have several distro targets in mind, MythBuntu, MiniMyth, and XBMC
> for Linux (boo, boo, hiss, hiss). Once I get these targets working
> (and solve and issues that appear), any distro should be bootable on
> the AppleTV.
>
> There's a MythBuntu sticky at
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=720676 where progress is
> posted and I always hunt the Linux forum at awkwardtv
> (http://forum.awkwardtv.org/viewforum.php?f=23)
>
> More later as this progresses,
> Scott

Kickass, Scott! Thanks!

-Pete