[mythtv-users] AppleTV with Linux

[Scott D. Davilla]

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