Tag Archive for 'atv'

Crystalbuntu: behind the scenes

Published on October 2, 2011 in General and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

It surprises me that a lot of users have little idea how Crystalbuntu works or how much effort is put in behind the scenes. A lot of users seem to think they are installing a pre-configured image which has XBMC, but this is far from the case. I thought I’d let you guys know about some development behind the scenes and what’s up and coming in the next couple of months.

  • Crystalbuntu is a dynamic system. Some users ask to downgrade to older versions such as “The July image” when the August update broke the addon system slightly. While a build downgrade was possible, reverting to the previous month’s state in its entirety was not. Crystalbuntu’s image is a core (that has significantly changed now I might add) and it fetches the new components in the form of ‘updates’. These updates are scripted changes rather than static images.
  • Crystalbuntu is not just an image and go system. When you install Crystalbuntu, the following is happening behind the scenes:
    • The system connects to an update server (which I have to maintain).
    • The system downloads new versions of XBMC (which I compile) and new versions of the CrystalHD driver (which I put in compilable form).
    • The system downloads new dependencies for XBMC (which I have to compile, because XBMC is no longer supported on Ubuntu 8.0.4, the best OS for AppleTV).
    • The system installs new features and updates (such as AirPlay, AirTunes, automounting, a new kernel, IO tweaks). These features are all configured for deployment by me.
  • As you can see, the system is not a static image with this pre-configured, it has to be maintained and work is constantly being put into it.

Updates I say, so what’s next?

  • AFP support
  • Native AirTunes integration
  • New JPEG library offering faster UI
  • Eden beta testing soon.

 

New Crystalbuntu Update: August 2011

Published on August 22, 2011 in News and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Following hot on the trails of the July update, this months update brings less features but some tweaks under the hood. Here are the main features:

  • New PVR build
  • Airtunes
  • Improved SSH performance
  • NFS support
  • Hulu support

For a full list of changes, see the changelog at the bottom of the page here

Just restart your Apple TV to get this update immediately. Let me know how it goes, and consider making a donation to help fund future enhancements such as the aforementioned.

New Crystalbuntu Update: July 2011

Published on July 21, 2011 in News and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Hey there, it’s time for the July update and as promised previously, this one is a biggy, bringing a lot of new features and optimisations to the table. Make sure you’ve read this.  Here are the main features:

  • AirPlay support.
  • PVR support
  • Dirty region rendering
  • CPU clocking improvements
  • Internal hard drive standby
  • Reduced IO activity
  • Lower power consumption
  • Reduction in heat output
  • Virtual memory handling improvements
  • Faster boot
  • Improved update system
  • Notifications system
  • XBMC optimisations
  • Bug fixes
  • Purging of unnecessary documentation

For a full list of changes, see the changelog at the bottom of the page here

On a sidenote, Mac users accessing their shares over SMB in XBMC should not upgrade to Lion because Apple have dropped Samba for their own implementation. The XBMC development team may fix this shortly in nightlies but for now it is important to not upgrade or implement afp manually if updating to Lion is necessary.

Just restart your Apple TV to get this update immediately. Let me know how it goes, and consider making a donation to help fund future enhancements such as the aforementioned.

New Crystalbuntu update: June 2011

Published on June 2, 2011 in General, News and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

It’s June, meaning it’s time for another update to the best aTV Linux distribution out there. On June 2nd 2010, Crystalbuntu was first released in the form of a USB image. It turns one year old today! It is amazing to look at how far development has come along now. The June 2011 update brings you the following:

  • Faster boot
  • Further reduced boot verbosity, a continued improvement from the May 2011 update
  • Booting without network connection is now a lot faster.
  • Plug and play auto mounting of USB drives (automatically visible in XBMC)
  • HFS support
  • Improved support for CompactFlash cards
  • Increased performance:
    • Improved memory handling
    • GPU optimisations (this has been omitted because it has not been tested enough, will probably debut in the next update)
    • Improved IO routines
  • Shutdown support now implemented
  • Bug fixes

For a full list of changes, see the changelog at the bottom of the page here

Just restart your Apple TV to get this update immediately. Let me know how it goes, and consider making a donation to help fund future enhancements such as the aforementioned.

New Crystalbuntu update

Published on May 12, 2011 in General, how-to, News and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

A new, Crystalbuntu update has been pushed out. This is the first significant update since the first image, here are the main features that the update brings:

  • Faster boot times
  • More streamlined update service.
  • Quieter boots
  • Bug fixes

For a full list of changes, see the changelog at the bottom of the page here

Just restart your Apple TV to get this update immediately. XBMC will need to reinstall itself in a new location. Let me know how it goes, and consider making a donation to help fund future enhancements such as the aforementioned.

Ubuntu 8.0.4 is EOL today

Published on April 30, 2011 in News and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Ubuntu 8.0.4 Desktop packages are no longer supported by Canonical. The LTS release has finished its three year support cycle.

What does this mean for Crystalbuntu users?

At the moment, nothing. The latest version of XBMC 10.1 Dharma, as well as the new nightly builds can run on Hardy just fine (although XBMC devs no longer officially support this platform). 8.0.4 LTS is still the best compromise between freshness, stability, performance and driver support.

What about the lack of security updates?

Ubuntu 8.0.4 is still a secure system, behind a router which is using NAT. This is because ports are not by default exposed to the world, unless a DMZ is set. Therefore, your system will be behind a firewall, and so security updates are not the necessity they would be if you were running a web server in a production environment. Those concerned about security: have you changed the default username and password and generated a new SSH key? No? Then your system would never have been secure.

What next when 8.0.4 won’t run XBMC anymore? Why is there no 11.04 image?

8.0.4 will probably run XBMC for a while. There is no later version of Ubuntu used because the driver support in these later systems would cause a loss of functionality. The NVIDIA 7300 GO will not utilise HDMI audio out on driver versions that are compatible with later versions of Ubuntu, so this results in a loss of passthrough and downmixing over HDMI, requiring RCA or optical. Worst of all, newer versions of Ubuntu have a larger footprint, and will use more resources doing the same thing, so while XBMC can run fine on 8.0.4 using typically 90MB of RAM (that’s ~ 35%) or less at load, it will be the primary image. The difference between Ubuntu 8.0.4 and Arch 10.5 in performance is negligible.

So if HDMI sound doesn’t work, performance is worse on later versions of Ubuntu, will we ever be running it on our aTVs?

Probably. The Nouveau driver is an open-source driver for NVIDIA cards and is maintained well. It will become more mature over time (it is currently rather buggy right now), but that should improve. This would allow HDMI sound output. Performance can probably be increased by minimising the image’s packages.

I don’t care about HDMI sound, give me a more up to date image?

Sorry but at this stage in time — there’s no need to do so. HDMI sound is valuable to many users, and this image is intended for the masses. Therefore, I would recommend you setup Ubuntu on aTV yourself if you are so inclined to go for an up to date distribution.

Most likely the next image will be based on the 12.04 LTS release.


Fixed: blinking question mark issue

Published on April 10, 2011 in News and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Hello,

First off: thanks for being patient. I haven’t had a lot of time in the last week, but once I got my head round the problem the solution was simple. The bug however, is a bit of a weird one. The internal hard drive installer seemed to be working for most people, but for a minority, they got a blinking question mark on reboot. Looking at people’s output of parted -s /dev/sda unit s print, I could see that there was no visible filesystem for the first partition (the Recovery partition). This is why the question mark arose — as there was no EFI bootloader, and it is why the mounting portion of the script failed, as there was no present filesystem.

I managed to replicate this problem somehow. The problem was not permissions, but rather the fact that the transfer to the first partition is corrupted. Running it through SSH is fine as the system has already initialised. The big giveaway was the time dd was taking. Swap and Recovery gave throughputs of around 7MB/s, but Recovery was completing at 24MB/s? Yeah right. So I implemented a small MD5sum check. For those that have a successful install, the script continues, else if the checksums do not match, the dd command for Recovery is run again. This fixes the problem every time. It seems the IDE controller is not initalised properly until the first bit of data is dd’d across (excluding /dev/zero), although I could just as easily image sda1 with /dev/random or /dev/zero and then image the Recovery filesystem, but there would be no point for those that have no initial problem.

Another update to the installer is that the Recovery partition is no longer fetched for Ubuntu. Seeing as the installer is running the exact same kernel (mach_kernel), the drive can be duplicated off of /dev/sdb1 and then the com.apple.Boot.plist be modified — which is done anyway. This only saves around 10MB of traffic but helps for people with slow internet connections and cuts out unnecessary waiting time

So for the average user, all you need to know is that the problem is fixed. Simply run the installer again and it should work fine. Once again, sorry about the delays.

Sam

Blinking question mark on aTV after CrystalHD installer

Published on April 3, 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

It has come to my attention that some people are getting the blinking question mark after a series of errors when running the IDE Installer image. If you are one of them, here is a brief explanation of what is happening:

The reason your HDD is not being imaged correctly is due to a permissions problem when dd tries to restore Recovery.img.gz to the partition. Therefore, when the script later tries to mount the non-existent file system at /dev/sda1 it fails. Without a correctly partitioned Recovery partition, the system cannot boot, and therefore it leaves you with an annoying ? mark blinking. You could manually copy these partitions over with an SSH session, or you could wait for me to redo the installer image. I am not sure why some aTVs work and some do not — there must be an underlying reason, but unfortunately I cannot identify it as it works every time for me. Originally, I wanted to use Penbuntu to image the devices, as it is a lightweight distro and even has kexec embedded for seamless kernel hotswapping. Unfortunately, when I originally embarked on testing it out, I found the screen would go blank after a few minutes and Davilla informed me this is a known Penbuntu bug. However, considering that Penbuntu may be the solution to our problems, and the fact that it is around 40x smaller, I think it is worth pursuing the problem. For all I know the problem may very well be rectified by “setterm -blank 0″

Please be patient in the matter and

Thank you for your understanding

Released: CrystalHD Linux distributions for AppleTV

Published on March 28, 2011 in General, how-to, News and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Hello. If you’re reading this, then I have good news :)

I have essentially completed the CrystalHD for AppleTV project that I began as far back as June 2010. The project now offers the following:

  • Installation of Linux onto the Apple TV’s hard drive, or onto a USB flash drive
    • via a UI installer in Windows
    • via a UI installer in Linux
  • XBMC Dharma
  • CrystalHD Drivers
  • Audio over HDMI
  • Self-updating system
  • Much more..

General

Undoubtedly, the most challenging aspect of development was the UI installers. Creating images with the software pre-packaged was simple enough, and I’d been successful in this technique as early as June last year. What was more difficult was manufacturing a UI installer that could either image a USB with a live image or an image that would install the software for the user on the internal drive. The Windows installer requires many external libraries such as the usbit (thanks to Alexander Beug imaging is possible). Combine that with the fact that Windows offers next-to-none integrated image and device manipulation mechanisms, unlike Linux where they are rife (namely dd, parted, mount etc), developing a UI installer is difficult. My injection method into the installer image relies on a marker I created and then located using a hex editor, where the distribution the user picks is injected as a byte array to this point. In essence, I had to write an application in Windows that manipulates a Linux filesystem that houses an OS that then emulates an EFI based Mac. Tri-platform :) .  This challenge has contributed to the project’s delay, as have other things going on in my life.

Thank you

I’d like to thank the XBMC community for the excellent support that it shows developers. When I released my initial image in June, I had no idea whatsoever of the immense popularity it would receive. Looking back at the old forum thread now I see that I managed to get over 1000 replies and over 200,000 page views. Message received: People wanted this image maintained and updated in the future. What I’d like to think I’ve done now is make installation a lot simpler by providing a friendly UI that allows installation onto either USB or the internal drive which was very much left alone to following erroneous tutorials where novices were confused by the mention of “/dev/sda”. By making installation simpler and hassle free, I hope that I have helped people realise the feasibility of loading Linux onto their device to enjoy performance gains, where they may have previously considered the task too challenging.

Where’s Arch?

I did say I was going to produce an Arch image. And I did. But apart from the fact it was more up to date than Ubuntu there seemed to be no perceivable gain in performance. In fact, there was a loss of functionality, primarily HDMI sound output, which meant that at this point in time where Hardy is still fit for purpose, there is no need to release an Arch image and double the level of maintenance that must be undertook. I will reconsider this on April 30th, the date on which Hardy will become EOL.

Please consider making a donation

As you are aware of, I have put a considerable amount of time into this project. I have had to make distribution specific images, an image to then install that image on to the hard drive, scripts to auto update the system, scripts to configure the system and two UI installers for two different platforms. Donations, I assure you, will result in future development of this project and will encourage me to spend more time on it. I am going to be in a constant state of maintenance as I maintain the auto-updating service for CrystalHD drivers and XBMC releases. If you feel that this project has helped revive your aTV, or at the very least made the process of getting Linux on your system easier, consider making a donation.

Enough! – where can I get the images?

The images are available through the UI installer (Xenity based on Linux) and these installers are obtainable from the project page here. It is recommended you consult the README file for the installer you are using and the distribution you are using — the FAQ will help solve any common problems that you might have.