2008-03-19, 19:06
Long boot time 30-60 seconds to tux/atv logo) issue solved. I've heard of this but never saw it until recent. This issue is that if the MBR is not a "proper" gpt protected MBR, the AppleTV will refuse to boot the disk first few times it looks around. Eventually, finding nothing else, it will accept the disk and boot.
My original Linux drives (from long ago) were partitioned on OSX so the proper MBR gets installed. I'm now using the patched parted process (which I think also places a MBR) and doing standard Linux distro installs.
My boot method looks for a grub menu.lst so one need to allow grub to install but grub also installs it's own MBR which the AppleTV efi firmware does not accept first time around.
I've placed instructions at http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader in the installing linux section and there a good MBR in the download section.
I'll continue to investigate this as it would be nice to have both grub and fast efi boot enabled.
My original Linux drives (from long ago) were partitioned on OSX so the proper MBR gets installed. I'm now using the patched parted process (which I think also places a MBR) and doing standard Linux distro installs.
My boot method looks for a grub menu.lst so one need to allow grub to install but grub also installs it's own MBR which the AppleTV efi firmware does not accept first time around.
I've placed instructions at http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader in the installing linux section and there a good MBR in the download section.
I'll continue to investigate this as it would be nice to have both grub and fast efi boot enabled.