AppleTV & Ubuntu hacking

I’ve finally enabled SSH on my long dormant AppleTV, and am integrating it into my DVB / Rails / Beanstalk / MySQL system for processing data. I’ve used the Patchstick image available from atv4windows. I ended up unpacking and dd’ing the image from the Mac, but the process remains exactly the same. I now have Perian, ssh and a slew of other things enabled, and all I need now is to attempt the hack to get composite output working. I’ve yet to take the plunge and replace my old CRT with an LCD TV.

Incidentally, for anyone looking to figure out the ssh username and password for your freshly enabled ssh daemon, they are both frontrow, and that user has passwordless sudo privileges.

I also had a minor breakthrough with my x86_64 Ubuntu 8.04 machine. I have a Zyxel G-202 Wireless USB stick, to keep the number of trailing wires to a minimum, but I kept getting an error saying:

zd1211rw error ioread32(CF_REG1): -110

Which was exceedingly unhelpful. I eventually tried disabling hi-speed USB from the BIOS, and rebooted to find it sprang into life immediately. Great! What was even more strange that when I rebooted and reset the BIOS back to enable USB 2.0, the G-202 kept working. I’m unsure whether this is due to the device not being cold booted, and I’ve yet to see if it stops working after I power the system off, but so far so good, and I don’t need to resort to NDIS.