GuySie Wrote:Manually changing the thumb (or doing anything else like editing a title) often freezes up the interface for a while, sometimes hanging the whole system. Might this be related to running from a USB stick with its slow transfer times versus the internal HD?

vajonam Wrote:davilla, your comment of its aint broke dont upgrade is valid,but is it possible to run more recent distro's on appletv like lucid for example? and upgraded nvidia drivers, i know there have been some fixes to hdmi output in the 19x seriers of drivers IIRC.

also do you run atvclient for lirc for IR? if i switch to lirc does this means my LED keeps blinking orange? at the moment I am running atv client.

GuySie Wrote:I assumed in earlier posts that partition resizing was only necessary for an image copied over to the internal drive; it appears that it's also necessary for an 8GB stick holding the 4GB image. I also found Defiler's references that this was a messy business and tooshna's posts on doing it on the internal drive. I'll have to read up some more on how this works precisely - I'm not a total n00b but this is a bit outside of my field of experience.

vajonam Wrote:davilla, your comment of its aint broke dont upgrade is valid,but is it possible to run more recent distro's on appletv like lucid for example? and upgraded nvidia drivers, i know there have been some fixes to hdmi output in the 19x seriers of drivers IIRC.

also do you run atvclient for lirc for IR? if i switch to lirc does this means my LED keeps blinking orange? at the moment I am running atv client.

defiler Wrote:Partition resizing is necessary if you want to unlock the remaining space on a drive >4GB, so with your 8GB drive you can benefit.

One of my posts had a step-by-step for Tooshna - same principle applies for you, and the same warning. Make sure you are working on the correct drive before you do anything irrepairable.

It'll also be slow on the USB drive (as you've seen). Playback is excellent, but navigating the menus (and anything that involves drive access, really) will be quite slow compared to the ATV client that runs off the hard drive. That's why some people (myself and Tooshna, for example) have installed the USB image to the hard drive. We're not interested in maintaining FrontRow compaibility, but speed is important to us.

If you want to improve the speed, but keep it on a USB drive, you need to get a faster flash drive. The best price/performance I've seen in the UK was these. I bought a few for work to use for VMWare servers, which can be touchy on speed. That's a year ago, though, so there'll be faster devices that aren't too much more expensive.

Hope that helps. I may be spouting nonsense as I'm out of my nut on painkillers.

defiler Wrote:Partition resizing is necessary if you want to unlock the remaining space on a drive >4GB, so with your 8GB drive you can benefit.

One of my posts had a step-by-step for Tooshna - same principle applies for you, and the same warning. Make sure you are working on the correct drive before you do anything irrepairable.

Quote:Parted (on Pin's image at least) throws a strop when you try to use it because it's got a bug (quite an old version) and can't handle the fact that the table says 4GB, the drive says 40/160GB, and there's no backup GPT at the end. So you need to write over the fdisk table (sector 0) and the start of the GPT table (sectors 1 and 2) in order to convince it that it's a blank drive.

So long as you took a note of the partition layout (either in bytes, or as Sam says in sectors), you can put the same table back in again (by hand) and parted will create (1) the GPT table from sector 1, (2) the dummy fdisk table at sector 0, and (3) the GPT backup table at the end.

Once you have that, you can swapoff the swap drive, delete it, extend the ext3 partition (via Sam's link), making sure to leave yourself 1GB at the end, re-add the swap partition on the end of the drive, swapon the swap drive again, and finally resize2fs the ext3 drive to activate the extra space. Phew!

defiler Wrote:It'll also be slow on the USB drive (as you've seen). Playback is excellent, but navigating the menus (and anything that involves drive access, really) will be quite slow compared to the ATV client that runs off the hard drive.

jodeman Wrote:After reading and re-reading all the posts in this thread, I've successfully copied the usb image onto the internal drive. Where I get stuck, is in expanding it to use all the space on the 40gb drive. I've tried following the instructions you posted back on page 88:



I have my partition layout:

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          26      204819+  ee  EFI GPT
/dev/sda2   *          26          29       25500   af  Unknown
/dev/sda3              29         333     2441406+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4             333         395      500000+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Based on Sam's link, I know I need to do something like this:

Code:

# Resize partition 4 and create the main partition for Linux + swap
parted -s /dev/sda resize 4 2732072s   54525951s
parted -s /dev/sda mkpart primary ext3 54525952s  77091549s
parted -s /dev/sda mkpart primary linux-swap 77091550s 78140126s

(except replacing partition 4 with partition 3), but I'm lost as to what numbers to put in there? Are there any other steps I need to do?

Thanks!

jodeman Wrote:After reading and re-reading all the posts in this thread, I've successfully copied the usb image onto the internal drive. Where I get stuck, is in expanding it to use all the space on the 40gb drive. I've tried following the instructions you posted back on page 88:



I have my partition layout:

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          26      204819+  ee  EFI GPT
/dev/sda2   *          26          29       25500   af  Unknown
/dev/sda3              29         333     2441406+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4             333         395      500000+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Based on Sam's link, I know I need to do something like this:

Code:

# Resize partition 4 and create the main partition for Linux + swap
parted -s /dev/sda resize 4 2732072s   54525951s
parted -s /dev/sda mkpart primary ext3 54525952s  77091549s
parted -s /dev/sda mkpart primary linux-swap 77091550s 78140126s

(except replacing partition 4 with partition 3), but I'm lost as to what numbers to put in there? Are there any other steps I need to do?

Thanks!

davilla Wrote:You can run newer distros, there's nothing stopping one from doing this, you will lose audio over HDMI unless someone figures out the magic. You will also have to deal with grub vs grub2 and missing vesafb in the newer distros.

davilla Wrote:Personally, I don't see any need to run a cutting edge distro on an appliance. I stopped playing the "got'a have the latest updated Linux distro" game long ago and I spend much less time fiddling with it and more time watching videos. This thing should be inside your firewall anyway so security issues are mute.

davilla Wrote:Use atvclient to switch the LED to white on startup before LIRC starts. This is a non-problem. Personally, I run the MS MCE USB remote/controller. It's still one of the best remote/controllers around.