OpenELEC on ATV

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Apple TV USB Install – (Mac OS X)

Updated: 12/1/2010

This is one way to install the openelec.tv distro on a USB drive for your Apple TV (written by C4)

Things you need for this install:

  1. atvusb-creator
  2. openelec.tv ATV release
    (OpenELEC-ATV.i386-devel-20101118-r4859)
    (OpenELEC-ATV.i386-devel-20101129-r5328)
  3. 1GB or greater USB drive
  4. Apple TV

Download the atvusb-creator from here. http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

Run the atvusb-creator. Choose the ATV-Bootloader option from the “Choose an Installation”. Make sure to check the USB Target Device to make sure that the device selected is the USB drive you want to install it on.

Click the “Create Using” button at the bottom. This will create 2 partitions. The first partition that is created is the recovery partition used by the Apple TV to recover from corrupted settings. The mach_kernel used by atv-bootloader is a custom kernel that will let us bootstrap into the openelec.tv kernel. The second partition is an empty named Patchstick and is not important since we will delete this partition in a minute.

Once the ATV USB Creator is finished, it should look like this.

Next we want to open Disk Utility, which is located in “/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility”. You should see something similar to this:

Click on the flash drive that we just used to install the atv-bootloader on. Click on partition.

Choose the PATCHSTICK and click on the “-” sign. This will delete the partition. Next we will click the “+” sign twice to create two new partitions. We do not want to delete the partition disk1s1 (or whatever your particular disk my be), just leave this one alone.

One of the newly created partitions (most likely the first) will hold the KERNEL and SYSTEM files used for booting openelec.tv. We can call this partition “BOOT” and change it to a type of FAT32 (MS-DOS FAT). We will make this partition around 128mb.

The next newly created partition we can call STORAGE and also give it the partition type MS-DOS (FAT). You can assign all of the rest of the drive space to this partition. It’s used to hold configuration files along with media depending on the size.

Once you have those set, you can click “Apply” and it will create the two new partitions.

Choose the BOOT partition and click the mount button. It should now be mounted and you can copy target/KERNEL and target/SYSTEM from the downloaded openelec release to the drive. You also need to create a file called patchstick.sh. You can open a text editor and paste in the following script. All 3 of these files should be in the root directory of BOOT.

#!/bin/bash
mkdir /boot
mount /dev/sdb2 /boot
echo "Booting Openelec.tv..."
kexec -l /boot/KERNEL --command-line="boot=/dev/sdb2 disk=/dev/sdb3 quiet"
kexec -e

Now your drive should look something like this.

Now we are ready to put it in the ATV and try booting.

– Next section should no longer be needed. Leaving up for reference. –

If you run into a screen that looks like this, then you have to make one more tweak.

There is an issue with the xorg not being able to startup correctly.

Put the USB stick back in your computer. When you are in finder, click the “Go” then “Go to folder”. By default the hidden folders are hidden in OS X. So you can either go directly to the folder or turn off hidden folders. To directly go to the directory type:

/Volumes/STORAGE/.config

Once you are in the config directory create an empty file and name it xorg.conf. Eject the usb disk and put it back into the ATV and boot it. You should now be able to boot into the XBMC dashboard.

NOTES:

This is a still a work in process. There are a bunch of things are not currently working and the guys at OpenElec.tv know about them and are working on them. I just wanted to get this info on the web because I would have liked to have read this before diving in.

New version released (OpenELEC-ATV.i386-devel-20101118-r4859) (OpenELEC-ATV.i386-devel-20101129-r5328)

The script posted above has a xorg.conf bug work around. They are working on fixing this and should not be need in a couple days. I will update the script when a new version of the ATV Dev release is released.

Known Issues:

  • RCA sound doesn’t work Fixed in current version.
  • WLAN (Wireless) is not working Working in the r5328 build.
  • Component Video does not work. (after bootstrapping into openelec)

Thanks again to Stephan at Openelec.tv.

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