User:Frijøle/Apple TV
From OSx86
This is a page where I'm keeping track of my work "hacking" the OS from an Apple TV to get it to run on other hardware. Eventually, I hope to get together instructions or at least copious documentation to assist others in this. Due to the hackish nature of the project, and that it is yet another re-purpousing of an x86-based OS X, I thought it would fit in nicely here.
The Apple TV holds a lot of promise, both in the possibilities to get full MacOS X running on it, as well as running its operating system, a stripped down version of OS X, on other hardware.
I'm working on trying to get the AppleTV version of OS X (hereafter referred to as AOS) running on my Intel-based Mac mini.
Here's what I've tried: First, the shot in the dark, was just loading the imaged AppleTV OS (AOS from here on out) partition onto the mini's hard drive, and booting from that. This actually was the closest to working I've gotten it yet. The shiny Apple logo on black shows up, and if you boot in verbose mode, you can see it starting, but it hangs at "Waiting for root device" then reboots after several minutes.
Next up, I tried installing a minimal Mac OS X install, then restoring the AOS partition's contents over it, replacing any files in the way, but leaving the extras. The thought here was that it would give me the extra drivers and stuff that had been stripped out of the AOS so, for example, they keyboard and mouse would work. Again, no dice. This time, though, it appeared to boot normally, but logged in as the user I had set up in the setup assistant, but failed to load the finder. However, interestingly enough, when I booted from an external drive, Startup Disk showed that as "AppleTV OS, 10.4.7" (as opposed to "Mac OS X 10.4.7" on the external).
Now, I'm trying to combine the two manually.
I've reinstalled my Mac mini with a minimal OS X install, and updated it to 10.4.7 (the same version as AOS is based on). I'm going to try to move over files and set up identical symlinks on the mini's drive, and see what happens.
