Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Enable NFS Server - AwkwardTV

Enable NFS Server

From AwkwardTV

[edit] AppleTV 1.0 software (Or Safe Update 1.1)

First we have to setup up the export: To do this we use the nicl command. (the netinfo command line utility) Since netinfo uses the / to separate path components, and we have / characters in the entry we want to create, those / have to be escaped. This is done with the backslash, \, and since we are running in a shell, we need to double them up. After the shell is done examining the command, the string \\/ becomes \/ which is what we need to pass to nicl.

sudo nicl . -create /exports/\\/mnt\\/Scratch\\/Users\\/frontrow

This will create an export for the frontrow users directory. We need to use the /mnt/Scratch/Users/frontrow path instead of /Users/frontrow because /Users/frontrow is actually a link which NFS doesn't like.

We can list all of the current exports on your appletv with:

sudo niutil -list . /exports

In our example that should result in something like:

89       /mnt/Scratch/Users/frontrow

If we wanted to delete this export we would do this (example):

sudo nicl . -delete /exports/\\/mnt\\/Scratch\\/Users\\/frontrow

Once we have our exports set up to our liking we need to start the mountd daemon and the NFS daemon. We would also have to start portmap, but it is already running on the appletv.

sudo /usr/sbin/mountd
sudo /sbin/nfsd -t -u -n 6

These commands start the mount daemon as well as the nfs daemon. The command arguments to nfsd just mean, enable TCP, enable UDP, and start with 6 threads. If you want the nfsd to start automatically, you can add the two commands above to your /etc/rc.local file.

If you make changes to your exports you don't need to restart the nfs server. You simply need to notify the mountd daemon to check for changes. You can do this by sending the "1" signal to the running mountd with this command:

sudo kill -1 `cat /var/run/mountd.pid`

If you want to check what exports are available on your appletv you can use the showmount command (from your Mac OS X box or Linux)

showmount -e appletv

Where appletv is the name of your Apple TV on your network.

To connect to the Apple TV NFS share from Linux you would type (from Linux):

mkdir /mnt/frontrow
mount -t nfs appletv:/mnt/Scratch/Users/frontrow/ /mnt/frontrow

[edit] AppleTV 1.1 software

I have not tested this.

Monday, April 28, 2008

LarsBlog - Archives for: September 2007

Installing Fink to access open-source apps on an AppleTV

Filed under: AppleTV — lars @ 04:23:11

I was recently able to enable ssh on my new AppleTV. One of the first things I wanted to do was to be able to play with it as a unix box and set up some standard open-source software on it. It seems there are a couple of package managers for opensource software on OS-X: Fink and MacPorts. However, as a non-Mac person, it took me some time to figure out how to install these on the cut-down unix environment provided by the AppleTV, and I had better luck setting up Fink. Below are the steps I used.

Note, this does not cover the installation of dev-tools so will only allow the install of fink's binary packages (Will hopefully write that process up later).

Pre-requisites:

Darwin x86 8.01 ISO (I used darwinx86-801.iso)
Fink intel installer (I used Fink-0.8.1-Intel-Installer.dmg)
An ssh-enabled AppleTv
OS-X /usr/bin/manpath command (optional)

The process:

Mount the Darwin ISO so you can access it's files (on windows, use something like DaemonTools). We're going to need some files from it later (commands that are missing on the AppleTV).
Use a program like WinSCP or FileZilla to connect to your AppleTV (username/password is frontrow/frontrow). First of all, it will help to have some basic unix-commands available that are missing on the AppleTV by default, such as 'vi' (text-editor), 'curl' (downloader, like wget) and while you're at it, 'top' (system monitor - not needed by fink but very handy all the same). These can be copied from the /usr/bin directory of the Darwin ISO, and for now just drop them in the your default/home directory (should be /Users/frontrow).
Create a directory called "Install_Fink" in your default/home directory on your AppleTV. Transfer the file Fink-0.8.1-Intel-Installer.dmg to this directory (You can use scp or FileZilla to do this)
Connect to your AppleTV using SSH (again, as frontrow/frontrow). You should start out in the frontrow user's home directory (and you can always get back there using the command: cd ~). Then change into the Install_Fink directory:
```
cd Install_Fink/
```
Now we're going to mount the .dmg file we copied in here earlier so that we can access the files inside:
```
hdiutil mount Fink-0.8.1-Intel-Installer.dmg
```
Now we're going to copy the files out of this .dmg and into a new directory under Install_Fink (as I had trouble running the installer directly from the mounted .dmg)
```
mkdir Fink-0.8.1-Intel-Installer
cd Fink-0.8.1-Intel-Installer
sudo cp -R /Volumes/Fink-0.8.1-Intel-Installer/ .
```
Now we're finished with the .dmg file's contents, we can detach it from the filesystem:
```
hdiutil detach /Volumes/Fink-0.8.1-Intel-Installer/
```
Now we're ready to install Fink. We first have to remount the root file-system as writable (as this is read-only by default on the AppleTV):
```
sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/disk0s3 /
```
Before we kick-off the fink install, let's take this opportunity to drop the extra unix commands (vi, curl and top) into the correct place to be executed. We need to set their permissions to be executable too:
```
sudo cp vi /usr/bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/vi
sudo cp curl /usr/bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/curl
sudo cp top /usr/bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/top
```
Now, finally, we run the installer we copied from inside the .dmg file, using a command called 'installer'
```
sudo installer -dumplog -pkg Fink\ 0.8.1-Intel\ Installer.pkg -target "/"
```
You should have about 20-30 lines of output, with a line near the end saying the install was successful.
Now there's one last step we need to perform before Fink is ready to use. Fink requires some environment variables to be set up before it will work properly. To do this, it provides a path-setup script that adds a line (that calls an init script) to your .profile file in your home directory. Unfortunately, Fink's automatic setup script seems to rely on a bunch of OS-X commands (printenv, basename, osascript, manpath in /usr/bin, possibly more) that appear to be missing from the OS on the AppleTV. So I took a look at the instructions on setting up this path manually: http://www.finkproject.org/doc/users-guide/install.php#setup
First we need to ensure that we have everything on our Apple-TV required to run Fink's init.sh script. We can do this by attempting to run it from the command-line:
```
. /sw/bin/init.sh
```
If you get no errors, then things are looking good. (Note: You may get an error about the 'manpath' command being missing. This doesn't *appear* to cause major issues. I had trouble using the manpath command from Darwin, but apparently the OS-X one will work).
Next, use the following commands to edit your .profile file.
```
cd ~
vi .profile
```
And add this line to the file:
```
. /sw/bin/init.sh
```
(In vi, you use i to go into 'insert' mode (so you can type), and wq to save and exit.)

This will ensure that the required environment variables are created whenever you login with ssh.
Now we can follow Fink's setup instructions here: http://www.finkproject.org/download/index.php?phpLang=en - by running:
```
fink scanpackages; fink index
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install fink
```
This will ensure that Fink and it's list of packages is up-to-date.
To test that it's working ok, you might want to try installing a couple of simple packages. First, I installed links - a lynx-like text based web browser:
```
fink install links
```
And then I installed wget, a command for downloading files from http or ftp servers (a bit like OS-X's curl):
```
fink install wget
```
And all seemed to work well! I can't guarantee that every Fink package is going to install properly using the above steps, but it seems like a good start.

You might want to check out the following links to continue from here:

Using Fink: http://www.finkproject.org/doc/bundled/usage.php
Fink Usage FAQ's: http://finkproject.org/faq/usage-fink.php

In a later post, I'll hopefully manage to install Apple's DevTools so that we can try some unstable packages and also building from source.

Good luck!

Thursday, April 10, 2008

gcc - High Performance Computing for Mac OS X

High Performance Computing for Mac OS X

Computation Tools :: Fortran

GCC 4.3 (auto-vectorizing gcc with openmp) :

Compiled using source code from the GNU CVS servers. This contains current versions of gfortran (GNU F95, this is a version of the much awaited, free, open source, F95 compiler), gcc (GNU C) and g++ (GNU C++) compilers that can perform auto-vectorization (i.e. modify code to take advantage of AltiVec/SSE, automatically). Use flag -O3 -ftree-vectorize to enable that option. For more information, see this webpage. Download my binaries, and cd to the download folder. Then gunzip gcc-bin.tar.gz (if your browser didn't do so already) and sudo tar -xvf gcc-bin.tar -C /. It installs everything in /usr/local. You invoke F95 by typing gfortran. You will also need to have Apple's Developer Tools installed. They are included on a separate CD in the retail version of OS X and also available as a free download from Apple's Developer Site. Please install the most current version of Developer Tools, version 2.4.1. Finally, note that there is an alternate g95 project, that is not part of GCC. They seem to have recently released their own official version of g95 for OS X which you may wish to try. Again, note that that g95 is not the same as this version here. Some reports suggest that this alternate g95 is ahead in the implementation of F95 features, but there are mixed reports regarding its optimization capabilities.

Binaries:

gcc-ppc-leopard-bin.tar.gz (PowerPC), gfortran-ppc-leopard-bin.tar.gz (PowerPC gfortran only), gcc-intel-leopard-bin.tar.gz (Intel Mac), gfortran-intel-leopard-bin.tar.gz (Intel Mac gfortran only), updated January 2008 (Leopard only).

gcc-bin.tar.gz (PowerPC), gfortran-bin.tar.gz (PowerPC gfortran only), gcc-intel-bin.tar.gz (Intel Mac only), gfortran-intel-bin.tar.gz (Intel Mac gfortran only), updated January 2008 (Tiger).

Documentation: click here!

ImageMagick: Install from Binary Distribution

Mac OS X Binary Release

We provide a Mac OS X binary distribution, however, if you already have MacPorts installed on your system, simply type:

  sudo port install ImageMagick

The port command downloads ImageMagick and many of its delegate libraries (e.g. JPEG, PNG, Freetype, etc.) and configures, builds, and installs ImageMagick automagically. Alternatively, download the ImageMagick Mac OS X distribution we provide:

Version	HTTP	FTP	Description
ImageMagick-universal-apple-darwin8.11.0.tar.gz	download	download	Mac OS X Tiger 10.4
ImageMagick-universal-apple-darwin9.2.2.tar.gz	download	download	Mac OS X Leopard 10.5

Create (or choose) a directory to install the package into and change to that directory, for example:

  cd $HOME

Next, extract the contents of the package. For example:

  tar xvfz ImageMagick-universal-apple-darwin9.2.2.tar.gz

Set the MAGICK_HOME environment variable to the path where you extracted the ImageMagick files. For example:

  export MAGICK_HOME="$HOME/ImageMagick-6.4.0"

If the bin subdirectory of the extracted package is not already in your executable search path, add it to your PATH environment variable. For example:

  export PATH="$MAGICK_HOME/bin:$PATH"

Set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable:

  export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="$MAGICK_HOME/lib"

Finally, to verify ImageMagick is working properly, type the following on the command line:

  convert logo: logo.gif
 identify logo.gif
 display logo.gif

Note, the display program requires the X11 server available on your Mac OS X installation DVD.

Congratulations, you have a working ImageMagick distribution under Mac OS X and you are ready to use ImageMagick to convert, compose, or edit your images or perhaps you'll want to use one of the Application Program Interfaces for C, C++, Perl, and others.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Netpbm home page

Netpbm home page
The Gallery project distributes a few Netpbm programs pre-built for various platforms. The purpose of this package is use with Gallery, but it is just ordinary Netpbm (usually rather old). It contains:

jpegtopnm
pngtopnm
pnmfile
pnmrotate
pnmscale
ppmtojpeg
ppmquant
ppmtogif
pnmtopng
giftopnm
pnmcut
pnmflip

This is the Gallery binary micro distribution of the NetPBM graphics package.
Both of these products are released under the Gnu Public License and source
code for each can be found at:

Gallery home page: http://gallery.sourceforge.net
NetPBM home page: http://netpbm.sourceforge.net

INSTALLING
----------

1. Unpack the tar/zip package into any directory.

2. Make sure the binaries are executable:
% cd netpbm
% chmod 755 *

XAMMP - Apache/MySQL/PHP5/Perl - AwkwardTV

XAMMP - Apache/MySQL/PHP5/Perl

From AwkwardTV

Jump to: navigation, search

XAMPP is a simple, most practical and most complete webserver solution. The XAMPP for OS X distribution provides an Apache 2 web server, integrated with the latest builds of MySQL, PHP (both 4 and 5) and Perl. It requires no dependencies.

If you are an experienced web developer or a Mac enthusiast who needs to run a webserver, create dynamic webpages or use databases, this is your lucky day!

[hide]

[edit] Note

The XAMPP package gets installed in /Applications which is in the partition /dev/disk3 (named OSBoot) and requires it to be mounted with write permissions.

In contrast, the /Users folder is linked to /mnt/Scratch/Users and as such is in the partition /dev/disk4 (named Media) which is mounted on /mnt/. This allows the system to be located on a read-only partition and as such to be more immune to unproper power off.

Anyway: once you've installed SSH on the AppleTV, you've decided to make a server out of it and you're going to treat it the right way.

[edit] Prerequisites

[edit] XAMPP package

The XAMPP package can be downloaded from their website. Choose the tar version.

[edit] Unzip binaries

Unzip binaries will be used on your AppleTV to extract the XAMPP package, but aren't found on the AppleTV base installation.

Download the binary Darwin for Intel distribution from the Opensource pages.
This contains many useful files.
Untar the file (Double click in Mac OS X)
Mount the disk image (Double click in Mac OS X)
In the Terminal:

scp /Volumes/Darwin8_i386/usr/bin/zip frontrow@AppleTV.local:/Users/frontrow/Documents
scp /Volumes/Darwin8_i386/usr/bin/unzip frontrow@AppleTV.local:/Users/frontrow/Documents
scp /Volumes/Darwin8_i386/usr/bin/gzip frontrow@AppleTV.local:/Users/frontrow/Documents
scp /Volumes/Darwin8_i386/usr/bin/gunzip frontrow@AppleTV.local:/Users/frontrow/Documents
scp /Volumes/Darwin8_i386/usr/bin/bzip2 frontrow@AppleTV.local:/Users/frontrow/Documents
scp /Volumes/Darwin8_i386/usr/bin/bunzip2 frontrow@AppleTV.local:/Users/frontrow/Documents
ssh frontrow@AppleTV.local
sudo -s
mount -uw /
mv /Users/frontrow/Documents/* /usr/bin/
chown root:wheel /usr/bin/*

You might want do install further binaries...

[edit] Installing XAMPP on the Apple TV

To Install the XAMPP package on the Apple TV follow this steps :

[edit] On your Mac

Copy the .tar.gz file to your Apple TV (the way you prefer, AFP, SCP, etc...).
Fugu provides a graphical interface for this purpose.

Open a SSH connection to your Apple TV.

[edit] On the AppleTV

Navigate to the download folder.

Get the required privileges:

sudo -s
mount -uw /

Extract the downloaded file:

tar -xvzpf xampp-macosx-0.7.2.tar.gz -C /

Start your XAMPP:

/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp start

You should see the following:

Starting XAMPP for MacOS X 0.7.2...
XAMPP: File permissions are being checked... this may take a while.
XAMPP: Starting Apache with SSL (and PHP5)...
XAMPP: Starting MySQL...
XAMPP: Starting ProFTPD...
XAMPP for MacOS X started.

Try your installation by surfing to http://AppleTV.local and choose a language.
Tip - If you get PHP errors, it's because you didn't extract it with the 'p' parameters. Re-extract it with the exact command.

Assuming it's working, it's time to secure your XAMPP installation.

/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp security

Tip - If you give an SQL root password, the demos won't work any more.

[edit] Configuring Apache

Find the Apache configuration file:

find /Applications/xampp/ -iname httpd.conf

Mine is /Applications/xampp/etc/httpd.conf

Find the location of the web pages:

cat /Applications/xampp/etc/httpd.conf | grep ^ServerRoot

Mine is /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/htdocs/

You can modify the location of the web pages in httpd.conf and put your files at the proper location.

[edit] Enabling at boot time

[edit] Enabling the Apple way

Apple provides a page on how to create a Startup Item.

[edit] Enabling using the AppleTV base installation

The AppleTV already ships with an Apache startup file: /System/Library/StartupItems/Apache/Apache which will need some modifications.

If not done already, get the required privileges:

sudo -s
mount -uw /

Optional: set new host name

scutil --set ComputerName NewName
scutil --set LocalHostName NewName

Make your root partition to be mounted read/write at startup:

touch /.readwrite

Edit the file /System/Library/StartupItems/Apache/Apache and replace apachectl with /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp

Edit the file /etc/hostconfig and replace WEBSERVER=-NO- with WEBSERVER=-YES-

Test it:

reboot

and surf to http://AppleTV.local

[edit] Enabling with the help of AFP

Assuming you have enabled AFP (AppleShare) to start at boot, you can add the line:

/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp start

to the file /System/Library/StartupItems/AppleShare/AppleShare after the If statement in the StartService function, and then XAMPP will startup at boot time.

Adding XAMPP to the AppleShare startup item is not recommended.

Installing Sapphire Manually Sapphire Browser

Installing Sapphire Manually

These instructions are intended to be used to install Sapphire Manually on your AppleTV. You will probably only need to do this if Sapphire is unavailable through the ATVLoader (it takes a little while for new versions to get approved by AwkwardTV to be listed).

-WARNING- READ THIS TUTORAIL FIRST. If you are not confident in what you are going to be doing PLEASE DON’T PREFORM THIS TYPE OF INSTALLATION and wait for the ATVLoader to be updated.

1. We need the IP address for the AppleTV - to find it go to the AppleTV’s Menu and select Settings -> Network. For these instructions we will assume the IP Address is 192.168.100.100.

2. We need to make sure SSH is enabled. To turn it on, go to the Awkward TV plugin and select the SSH Service button. The button will say “SSH Service Enabled” when it’s turned on.

3. Now we need to SSH into the AppleTV. Using the terminal* type: “ssh -1 frontrow@192.168.100.100″. Remember to use your AppleTV’s IP Address.

4. The password is “frontrow”

5. Now we need to make sure we can write to the OSBoot volume. Using the terminal* type: “sudo mount -uw /”. Again, the password is “frontrow”.

6. Now our AppleTV is ready for an install. If you already have a version of Sapphire Installed we need to remove it. Using the terminal* type: “sudo rm -r /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/Sapphire.frappliance”.

7. Now we need to get the new version on the AppleTV. From your computer, copy the Sapphire.frappliance folder on to your AppleTV’s frontrow partition.

8. Now we need to move the Sapphire.frappliance folder from the frontrow partition to the OSBoot partition. Using the termianl* type: “sudo mv ~/Sapphire.frappliance /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/”

9. Almost done! we just need to reload the AppleTV’s UI. Using the terminal* type: “sudo reboot”.

10. Wait for the AppleTV to reboot.

* To open a terminal window type “Terminal” into spotlight - it will be the top hit.

Apple TV Hack

Tuesday, April 29, 2008