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October 09, 2004

PPC Linux Boot CD for Tivo?

So I have no PCs in the house. Thank God! There must be some way to boot up the Tivo with my Mac and perform the typical hacks. In particular start up the shell, install tivoWeb, etc.

What exactly makes the Linux Boot CD for Tivo special? File system support? Partition support? If it's not special in those ways, then it would seem you should be able to hack the Tivo without a PC ever having to touch it.

-- jmathews

October 9, 2004 in Mac, TiVo

Answers

I don't know of any bootable TiVo hacking CDs that work on a mac tower, but it should be possible. I just think few in the TiVo hacking community own macs or use them exclusively, so they've never ported the tools to a PPC aware flavor of linux.

You'd think everything could be done in OS X natively though, given that OS X is BSD style unix.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Oct 9, 2004 10:12:09 PM

The only thing special about the TiVo boot CDs is that they normally use kernels that are deliberately built _not_ to support hard drives greater than 137 gigs (no LBA48 support), because most TiVo kernels don't support that either, and if your Linux kernel does and you use a drive greater than 137 gigs, you'll create a filesystem that the TiVo can't address properly.

I did most of my TiVo hacking using a generic Knoppix boot CD, not the standard MFS Tools CD. You should be able to do everything from OS X, although there are some tools that are Linux-specific that make things easier (e.g. 'tivopart' which will make the TiVo's strange partition table usable by Linux).

Posted by: Dan McGuirk at Oct 10, 2004 2:29:22 AM

You absolutely don't need a PC to hack your tivo. You can do everything you would want to do with your Mac. Check out MacTivo.com for details.

Posted by: MacTivo at Apr 7, 2005 6:01:59 PM

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