Inverted Reality

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Firefox web browser on AppleTV

More AppleTV hacking. Last night I figured I’d see if my keyboard and mouse work on the AppleTV after tinkering with all the new nitoTV enhancements. Indeed they work. I can quit out of the gui and see the system preferences where I can get the keyboard and mouse to work. Only, you cant see the mouse pointer! very tricky.

I followed the instructions on the awkwardtv wiki to enable the mouse pointer, and install firefox.

Worked a TREAT! It’s actually quite good. I’m really impressed. Now when I’m having an argument about a movie with my wife I can stop the movie, jump into firefox and do some quick IMDB research to prove a point :)

I’ve also installed the ‘netusage’ extension for firefox so i can see my internet quota usage, and I’ve bookmarked my local weather sites.

Very cool. read it all on awkwardtv.org

13 Responses

  1. stab says:

    Hi,
    Just got me an ATV off ebay with Nito, ssh, afs- its all on there!
    I’m dead keen to get firefox up and running and saw your blog and it made me keener! but not being a terminal geek is scaring me. How do you get the USB hack working from Nito?

    cheers

    stab

  2. James says:

    Okay, you need the latest version of nitoTV installed. You should be able to ‘upgrade’ from the awkwardTV menu (if you have that installed). once the new NitoTV is installed there will be new menu choices. One is turbo’s kext installer, run that. Then there’s a “system update”. for this to work nicely you ultimately need an intel mac on your local network. the system updater will connect to it and get down the files it needs.

    from there, there’s more hacks, like getting the mouse pointer to show, etc. All directions are available on the awkwardtv wiki!

    Cheers

  3. stab says:

    Thanks heaps man!
    Just got to loan an intel mac (used to have one for work- now I just have my trusty-rusty Titanium 867PB!)

    I’ve found awkardtv alittle … awkward (ie unix-y) but I’ll persevere.
    cheers mate
    stab

  4. stab says:

    hiya,

    I’m stuck trying to create a patchstick.

    In Terminal its asking me…

    Please specify the disk to re-partition as argument one:
    ./createpatchstick /dev/diskX

    what exact command do I need to select the disk?

    cheers

    s

  5. stab says:

    oops just so you know, i’m typing…

    /dev/disk1

    I get

    Permission denied

  6. James says:

    try:

    diskutil list

    or:

    df

    which should list the drives mounted on the machine

    It’s possibly /dev/disk1S0. check to see which listed device closely matches the capactiy of the USB stick…

  7. stab says:

    cheers.

    Its got to be disk1s1
    But it keeps telling me Permission denied!

    should i try reformating the usbstick?

  8. James says:

    you could try formatting it. Also maybe you need to be “root”

    $ su
    Password:

    then create the patchstick

  9. stab says:

    Ok

    by “Password:” it means type my admin password and then return right?

    When I enter it it just says
    su: sorry

    ???

  10. brett says:

    did you happen to try abc.com and streaming tv media? I’d really like to be able to do that!

  11. James says:

    I haven’t tried much else on my ATV for a while. I installed the Channl.Tv plugin, but they still aren’t active yet, so it does nothing. boo. I’m sure we’ll see more plugins and apps emerge over time

  12. Deeja says:

    How did you quit the GUI and get to sys prefs? I’ve tried using the ATVLoader ‘quit’ option but all I get it the apple screen and then the GUI restarts.

  13. James says:

    the GUI seems to stay closed when you have an app running in the background. Or, if you keep closing the GUI, it will eventually stay closed. It’s the ‘watchdog’ in action, restarting the GUI when it thinks it’s failing. You will of course need to do the mousepointer hacks so you can see what your doing, etc.

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