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Hello everyone!
I'm planning to install Arch Linux on an old AppleTV first generation. The mail goal is to transform that obsolete but yet stylish tvbox into an internet music streamer, using CLI apps to connect to Youtube Music, Tidal, Spotify, Deezer, etc, etc. AppleTV One is old but capable of 129kHz 24bit audio, which turns it a very interesting to HiRes music playback. And I know that there's more budget solutions today like a Pi, but the analog components after the DAC delivers very nice audio quality sound from appleTV's RCA out. A decent DAC for RaspberryPi adds a significant cost to any solution based on Pi...
I was tinkering a lot with OSMC, a nice distribution that enables KODI for this box. However, OSMC's last version for ATV1 is from 2017 and based on Debian Jessie. So, I need more updated code to install the latest versions of CLI stream apps and I'm planning to try Arch instead of Debian 10 Buster.
With Debian I can follow the instructions on this old page, which suggests deboostrapping a more recent Ubuntu release into a penbuntu 2008 created by an atv-bootloader app. Those instructions works for Debian and I would like to know if is possible to do the same to install Arch32 on the AppleTV One....
https://kodi.wiki/view/Archive:HOW-TO:I … aster_boot
Does anyone know how to do it? I can't find an netboot install for Arch32...
I'm not new to linux but I'm not a developer. As I'm an Aeronautical Engineer, Linux to me was always a hobby, never had the chance to dedicate to learning it properly.
I'm more like a linux evangelist... :^P
However, as I have some experience, I think I can handle this task and my plan is to use this project to learn more about linux and expand my job horizons...
Thanks in advance for any help!
Best,
Zeh
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Archlinux expanded my horizons greatly when I went though the process of installing it on my old boxes, so it looks to me like you've made a good choice there.
I have not come across the atvbootloader yet so I don't really understand what it's doing or what it's for really. The ATV has a hard disc and a BIOS and USB ports I assume, so it shouldn't be impossible to get an arch iso onto it somehow. Those are bascially command line live isos, which will download updated packages to install to the hard disc.
Architecture: pentium4, Testing repos: Yes, Hardware: EeePC 901+2GB RAM+OS half on the SD card.
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Hey, someone already post about experiment on bootstrap-Ing arch Linux 32, you can check on another section, 4 months ago I tried to find the bootstrap image of arch Linux 32 too.
I'll go dive into the post and I'll give you the link.
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Yeah, but presumably he has an adequate connectivity solution for this box already, since he's planning to use it for youtube et. al. playback. So he can just follow the instructions as written to pacstrap his hard disc partitions.
Architecture: pentium4, Testing repos: Yes, Hardware: EeePC 901+2GB RAM+OS half on the SD card.
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Archlinux expanded my horizons greatly when I went though the process of installing it on my old boxes, so it looks to me like you've made a good choice there.
I have not come across the atvbootloader yet so I don't really understand what it's doing or what it's for really. The ATV has a hard disc and a BIOS and USB ports I assume, so it shouldn't be impossible to get an arch iso onto it somehow. Those are bascially command line live isos, which will download updated packages to install to the hard disc.
Hi Levi,
Great to know that Arch helped you. It encourages me. Nice!
The thing with Apple TV is that it has some particularities regarding to UEFI boot. It's apple.... ;-)
AFAIK, atvbootloader extract some files from ATV stock image (a stripped down version of OSX Tiger 10.4) and makes a usb boot drive with a netboot version of ubuntu called penbuntu. So, some newer ATV focused linux distros like openelec, OSMC, Kodi Kinos, are based on newer debian releases bootstrapped into this netboot environment created by atvbootloader.
So, I don't know if there's a way to boot Arch32 on the ATV without relying on this solution. Making a regular usb boot drive don't work unfortunately...
To give an idea, here is the files at /boot dir of OSMC
osmc@osmc:~$ ls -l /boot
total 14412
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 68619 Jan 29 2017 BootLogo.png
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4 Jan 29 2017 System
-rw------- 1 root root 2032339 Jan 22 2017 System.map-4.2.3-22-osmc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 298800 Jan 29 2017 boot.efi
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 588 Jun 25 08:34 com.apple.Boot.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 96660 Jan 22 2017 config-4.2.3-22-osmc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2760 Jun 25 08:34 install.log
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6137572 Jan 28 2017 mach_kernel
-rw------- 1 root root 6106624 Jan 22 2017 vmlinuz-4.2.3-22-osmc
osmc@osmc:~$
As you can see, there's even an apple plist file there...
There's also this solution focused on Gentoo. The fact is that I don't know what Arch32 files I need to run by kexec over to the liveusb kernel as those solutions did with Debian and Gentoo....
https://kodi.wiki/view/Archive:HOW-TO:I … Apple_TV_1
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Cool!
Thanks buddy. I'll give it a look!
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