Applications running on the Apple TV

by editor @ AppleTVHacks.net on March 24, 2007

The members at somethingawful.com have kept tinkering with their Apple TV’s all day, and have made surprising progress. Amongst their achievements:

- They have the VLC player running on the box
- It has been noticed that components Apple Remote Desktop are installed, though no success in getting it working yet
- Some success getting SSH access up and running
- Where Finder.app would normally be is where the specialised interface app lives

Keep it up guys!

    • Jonathan

      Odd. The SSH hack did not work for me. I get “ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host” when attempting to connect to the Apple TV.

    • Jonathan

      Ooops. I’m dumb.

      I was copying the wrong things for sshd.

      Works great when you have the right files. :-|

      I attempted to use the ARD 3.1 client installer and Pacifist on the OSBoot volume. It appears to have installed and a kickstart command does not fail. However, whenever I try kickstart, a crashdump is written for FrontRow.app.

    • Tom

      Jonathan, good job with the sshd.

      As for Apple Remote Desktop; interesting, keep working on it! :)

    • devros

      What fies did you end up copying over to get ssh to work? I’m getting the same errors.

    • peragrin

      finder completely replaced eh? hmmm sounds like apple is working on getting rid of the one real hold over app. I wonder what other kinds of interfaces they have up their sleeves now.

    • Jonathan

      Interesting that the OSBoot volume is apparently mounted as a read-only file system. I can’t copy any files to anywhere in the / path while the Apple TV is running. Copying to /Users/frontrow works because it is mounted separately as /mnt/Scratch/Users/. Unless I’m missing something, it won’t be as easy as I had hoped to modify the running Apple TV. :-/

    • http://dockingbay94.net Paul Rodriguez

      could you please elaborate on what you did to fix your issues? i’ve been trying, literally, for days and can’t figure it out. i’m getting the same ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host message.

    • Greg

      For all of you using the Engadget instructions and getting the “ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host,” the following gave me that error…

      ——————–
      Make sure sshd is executable
      sudo chmod +x /Volumes/OSBoot/usr/sbin/
      ——————–

      should be

      ——————–
      Make sure sshd is executable
      sudo chmod +x /Volumes/OSBoot/usr/sbin/sshd
      ——————–

      They left off sshd — If you were following instructions without thinking (and copy & pasting like I did) that would be the problem.

    • DVL

      Regarding the problem with “ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host,” — I have the same problem and tried with different methods:

      1. I used the guide on Engadged (and ssh.plist) and got the error.
      2. I used SSHD from patchstick.dmg and (ssh.plist) got the same error.

      I even tried to modify the permissions on sshd with success but still the same error in the end.

      The weird thing is ownership of the files copied on ATV harddrive. On my machine says “_unknown”, the owner and the group. I tried to change that with chown but no success.

      If you guys have any ideas how can I solve this problem, feel free to write a comment or send an email.

      I’m running version 2.0 on my ATV (not “Take 2″!)

      Regards,
      DVL

    Previous post:

    Next post: