I have recently gotten into the Apple TV scene. I know it has been around for a while now but the prices are low enough now to gain my interest. This is my second Apple TV I picked up yesterday with the intention of running OS X on it.

To start I gathered some stuff I would need for the thing to work. Also not pictured is a little usb->2.5IDE adapter that I had.



After that It was time to break it open. Apple is just being a pain in the ass when putting T10 to hold the cover and T8 to hold the hard drive in.



And here it is opened up.



So, All of the directions online say to install the Intel version of OSX 10.4. Here is where my problems begin. I dont have an intel mac. My work only has PPC macs, so that doesn't help. I had Kalyway's 10.5.2 so thats what I decided to try first.

Here is is installing off of my laptop.



Now after changing the boot.efi file, blessing it, removing nvidia kexts, and booting I get no output to HDMI-DVI. Is anything outputting? im not sure that is all I have to test it with. I replaced the kernel with semthex one and tried to boot. I didn't expect it to work with a 10.4 kernel with a 10.5 OS but it was worth a shot. So I booted up and I got something to display which was nice, although it was a kernel panic.



I think i'm going to download the JaS 10.4.8 Image tonight and give that a go. I'll post up what I find.

This shit is so damn cool! Keep us posted often! On a side note, just found that my dad has a few "left over" computers from his old business. Might take em apart for parts or use one to make a linux box. I'll make a thread about it if I do.

Here are the Install instructions I'm kind of following from AppleTVHacks.net heres a link. http://www.appletvhacks.net/2007/04/01/m...running-on-apple-tv/

I'm waiting right now for the 10.4.8 img to download.

I like, you have so many cool gadgets now.

mayko wrote:
I like, you have so many cool gadgets now.

Yeah but getting them to work the way I want is the hard part.

Before I start on this post I need to give a BIG thanks to c4pt on the OSX86 IRC for helping me out with this.

At the end of the Last post I had installed 10.5.2 with a semthex 8.8.1 kernel ( I think) deleted the nvidia kexts and bless the boot.efi file.

This time I downloaded JaS 10.4.8 SSE2+SSE3 and started to install that. This took about 3 hours (SOO SLOW!)



On boot I would fail at this screen.



Here is it hooked up.



After a fresh 10.4.8 install and following the instructions from appletvhacks.net in my last post. This really didn't get me anywhere. c4pt from OSX86 helped me play around with some kexts trying to figure out which graphics driver was causing it to choke.




We kinda gave up on 10.4.8 and decided to move to 10.5.2 again.

WOOT! And we have a GO!
I decided to start with a fresh install of Kalyway 10.5.2. c4pt has posted some images of which options to select under “customize” I will link them when I find them. The options were very minimal and there wasn’t a lot of crap that I installed.

After doing the install, I copied over the boot.efi file. We had a discussion on where this should go, he thought it should go in /usr/standalone/i386/ and I thought it should follow the 10.4 instructions and go in /System/Lirbrary/CoreServices/. I ended up putting it in system and blessing it following the instructions from 10.4

I did not remove ANY kexts to get this to work, like it explains in the previous post and on appletvhacks.net or on hackint0sh.org. Again this is how I got it to work.

I put the drive pack in, booted it up and…











It looks like it has no sound driver. (which I expected) It did pick up the wifi card, and the Ethernet.

As far as I can tell everything else works. I will post up more when I find info on the sound card.

I got the sound working with this.

www.mediafire.com/download.php?ezmhju42lzm

The only problem is that it's real quiet even when turn up the speakers. I'm looking more into this.

Here are the customize options I chose when installing Kalyway 10.5.2

I did also add the "SSE2_JAS1048_ACPI_APIC" that is not pictured.

Just tried this and it works great!

I am curious though, have you tired updating to 10.5.6?
I would imagine it'd be safer to update first before blessing.

aixporter wrote:
Just tried this and it works great!

I am curious though, have you tired updating to 10.5.6?
I would imagine it'd be safer to update first before blessing.

No i have not tried updating to 10.5.6

I am still trying to tweak 10.5.2 to run faster on the atv. I would think there would be two ways to do this.

The first being:

download a OSX86 version of 10.5.6 (I don't know a name of a disc off hand) and install with the way the I have shown / you have done successfully.

Or second:

you could try what you have said by installing 10.5.2 and trying to update it via apples update. I personally have had trouble in the past using apples software to update an ODX86 machine.


If you try either one, post up the results so we can give a heads up to other people trying this hack.

So I did apply the apple updates this past weekend and now I'm getting a black screen after the apple boot screen. Looks like i'll have to get to 10.5.6 another way.

In your instructions you didn't state if you replaced the mach_kernel with that on hackintosh. Since the one posted there was built on the 10.4 kernel, I was reluctant on replacing it.

aixporter wrote:
In your instructions you didn't state if you replaced the mach_kernel with that on hackintosh. Since the one posted there was built on the 10.4 kernel, I was reluctant on replacing it.

I also tried to get to 10.5.6 this weekend, with no luck. I tried with ideneb 10.5.5 then upgrade to 10.5.6 but it didn't recognize the os partition after boot. I decided to install 10.5.2 back on it. I have had the most luck with that so far. I kinda like using it as a little desktop so the more i keep messing with it the more time i dont have a desktop to play with.

On the hackint0sh for there is a post about a guy getting functioning sound to work, which i did try and works great.

I did not change the kernel. the mach_kernel was built for 10.4 and you are correct will not work with 10.5. I am still playing with a few things try to get it to 10.5.6 but if i can't get it to work, I probably won't worry to much about it.

in that case, i'll keep trying on my end.

the atv i'm working on is for work,
but as soon as i get this baby foul-proof i'm getting one for myself at home.
its disappointing thought to have the atv not support 1080p...

Here is the sound driver in case you didn't have it.

I saw the one posted up on rapid share went down.

Hi, thx for this Project it's really great..
i've follow this guide and everything is good but i've problem with audio
the last link doesn't work.. (zip error)
and the first give me a sound real quiet..
have you a solution for the audio?
... audio for me it's very important !
Thx a lot bye