[banan]

As the title says.

Anyone who have tried this combo that have any point-of-views?
Reason that I'm asking is that I have the hardware, I'm just wondering if
it's worth to try?

I saw it written somewhere that the XBMC GUI navigation experience would be better if I use
Ubuntu rather than the ATV OS (OS X). And I'm also more comfortable
with Linux than OS X (Have Macbook, and Linux laptop).

Soo.. Should I just go-ahead and buy myself a ION based system, or is this
something that one could be pleased with? I know the hardware specs of the ATV, and I'm not compairing it with a ION system.



It's also more fun to do something that needs a bit of tinkering


Edit:
Anybody tried/know if it's possible to use suspend and wake on usb with the AppleTV hardware? The ATV has sleep and wake on ir with osx.. Can't find anything on this..

[dan1son]

I run that exact hardware on my ATV. Now that the broadcom drivers are released into the wild they'll build and run fine on Ubuntu Karmic, which requires much less tweaking to get some of the newer MCE USB dongles working. The SIIG I bought just plugs in and goes. Nothing else to be done on the Linux side for the remote. The only other thing I did was made the intel audio drivers think I have an IMac, which gets optical working. (you can find how to do that online, even the bootloader site for Mythbuntu 8.04 has that small change).

Couple of notes... The ATV has minimal RAM so if you want any type of GUI you'll want to install XUbuntu Desktop and not the full blown Gnome (they're both included on the standard install, I use the netinstall). I run XBMC with no GUI (the xbmc-standalone xsession) as it gives as much RAM to it as possible. Works pretty well really.

Also, if you look around the compiling crystalhd on Linux and the other large Crystal HD thread you'll find some tweaks Davilla posted. One has to do with giving 64megs of RAM back from the video card to the system when X is running... that makes a big difference for me.

The hardest part of the whole ordeal is partitioning the hard disk (info for that is also found on the atv-bootloader site) and realizing you can use the ATV-Patchstick creator to make a bootloader USB drive and just pop the net install files onto that without any other manual work. I'd post links, but I don't have the time to search around at the moment.


For the record, I also have a Revo. I'd be happy with either one to be honest (I wanted 2 ). Once the CrystalHD bugs get worked out, they'll be pretty much identical as far as I'm concerned. No need to buy more hardware if you have an ATV sitting around.

EDIT: No, the ATV can't suspend or resume. It draws almost as much power "suspended" anyway...

[banan]

Thanks for your inputs

I'm aware of the minimal amount of ram (256 shared), but I'm thinking stripped down Ubuntu (No gnome/xfce) and just trying to optimize it for xbmc. Really going for something more like the xbmc live distro.

Too bad about the suspend/resume not working.. I have a hdmi-switch that don't like av-boxes with a constant signal (problem with auto switching).

Anyway, thanks again. I'm going to try it too