Some of you may know that I hacked my Apple TV to run Ubuntu 9.04 on it to turn it into a media centre. I sorted out the driver issues, got the network speeds up, got digital surround sound to work, but it all wasn’t enough. The computer started to get bogged down with the extra clutter. It was slow to start and brutally slow to find movies. The last straw was when it no longer could find any of my movies and the whole library self destructed.
Well I had enough. I started to restore my Apple TV to being just an Apple TV. It didn’t go well. I followed the instructions to rebuild the recovery partition, copied the OS files over and restarted the box. I was very disappointed to see this flashing question mark on the screen and nothing was happening. What’s worse is that I destroyed the Linux partition in the process so I couldn’t telnet back into the box. I was really certain I just turned my Apple TV into a paper weight.
I thought about it a lot the next day and realised my mistake. When I copied the files to the recovery partition I was copying the hacked files to run Linux and not the proper Apple TV OS files. So when the Apple TV booted up it ran the hacked Linux start-up sequence but couldn’t find the Linux OS because I removed it. Hence the Apple TV question mark, it couldn’t find a bootable operating system. I tried again and made sure to copy the proper Apple TV OS files this time, not the hacked Linux files, and when I restarted the Apple TV the system did its recovery magic.
In the end I got to try some cool open source projects out, play with Linux and test a media centre PC. Although this particular project failed it has given me a new project for when I head back to Vancouver. A full blow media centre PC capable of playing HD movies and games with full surround sound to replace my stereo, Xbox and Apple TV. The idea of PC games at 1080p on maximum display settings on a 50 inch TV is pretty hot but it won’t be cheap.
Recent Comments