I managed to get a great deal on an Apple TV from Craigslist. I decided to pick one up after taking a look at the Apple TV Hacks website. See, I was looking for a really cheap Mac on Craigslist and was not having any luck. I found out that you can actually turn your Apple TV into a full blown Mac OS X box running at a blazing fast 1GHz. The whole motivation behind this is to jailbreak my iPhone 3G.
Anyway, at a price tag of $140, I decided that the Apple TV would be my cheapest entry point into the Mac world. Having acquired Leopard and a 2.5″ external drive enclosure from my vendors, I should be ready to start hacking away as soon as the UPS truck comes today.
I’ll be posting pictures and compiling information here. For instance, I found a handy little page that tells you how to create a backup image of your original Apple TV drive using FOSS tools (from Linux command line).
For safety purposes, I intend to recommision an old 40GB laptop drive that I have laying around. Once I know everything seems to work perfectly, I’ll take the plunge for real and use the 160GB drive that came with my Apple TV. That is, of course, unless I decide to upgrade to a 250GB drive ;o).
(I know that $140 price is ridiculously low for a 160GB Apple TV but I got extremely lucky. No it is NOT stolen. I bought it off a college student whose parents take such good care of him that he didn’t mind selling it at a loss so that he could get the Blu-Ray player that his parents neglected to get for him. I thought it was a 40GB unit until I got it home, though he never said in his posting. He had only used it a few times and saw no real value in it.)
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more articles from you in the future.
- Jack