Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the linux-at-24-fps dept.
Eddie writes "Don't know how to stop your video recorder flashing 12:00. Want to run Linux on your TV top.
Check out the latest in Linux powered boxes. "
Its about the TiVo. And I think that I'm in love. Although
I don't see anything about Linux in there...
Controlling "The Dish"
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
Thanks to some wheeling and dealing on their part, you can apparently plug these things into the glorified serial ports on most DSS^H^H^HDIRECTV systems. This is actually useful since it lets the box control things without resorting to IR blasters and the like. They can probably ASK the receiver if it successfully landed on channel 401 so you don't miss your favorite porno.
Lots of stuff out there runs Linux. Some companies don't tell you about it, but some probing will reveal the true Penguin Nature hidden within.
Linux: The Ultimate Appliance OS
by
Skyshadow
·
· Score: 2
So, who here really thinks that Windows CE has a prayer in the appliance market?
Simply put, Linux provides a solid foundation without having all the restrictive licensing funkiness from Microsoft. Besides, why pay Redmond a fee per box when you could be using that money to undersell your competition (or, better yet, lining your pockets with it)?
The Cobalt Cube and these set-top boxes are only the beginning. It may not always be superficially recognizable as such, but pretty soon Linux will be living in the homes of everyone in the world who has electricity. Global domination, indeed.
----
-- Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
appropriate name for the device?
by
Doviende
·
· Score: 2
Just a technicallity, but wouldn't such a device be a Video Hard Disk Recorder, or a Video FlashRom Recorder instead of Video Cassette Recorder?
that would be VHDR or VFRR instead of VCR:)
-Doviende
"The value of a man resides in what he gives, and not in what he is capable of receiving."
-- "The value of a man resides in what he gives,
and not in what he is capable of receiving."
--Albert Einstein
Can I have one too please?
by
Jonas+�berg
·
· Score: 2
This sounds like an environment where Linux can be a really nice thing. Imaging being able to debug your VCR if it crashes! I've never had much success debuging a normal VCR.
I've read about Sony using a modified gcc with some added targets to compile code for their game machines so it's not that surprising though that free software is taken into the world of embedded system.
Often, when developing an embedded system, you can spend weeks or months just building the first stages of an embedded system that can support some application. If you instead choose to port the Linux kernel or make gcc able to compile native code for the CPU of your choice, they you have already gained several months of development.
Unfortunately, I have been in the situation recently where I have had to deal with Windows CE and I can say for a fact that I didn't very much like the experience. I'd honestly rather spend some time porting gcc so I can compile native code.
How would you feel about readline support on your remote control? Alan Cox recently wrote in his diary that he couldn't believe how Unix vendors can ship ancient shells without cursor control or job control with their systems. Well, I can't believe my stereo remote control still won't let me schedule playlists!
Re:Are you sure you want to get excited about this
by
Bullwinkle
·
· Score: 4
Humm.
I have read most of the posts since folks on Slashdot first started praising and bashing us. I have found that responsible poster just ask before they flame!
For the record, TiVo does not upload any information about you or the shows you watch. All the math is done inside the box. We, along with our partners, are the only PTV company who has no plans for downloading Ads to the box, and we are the only PTV company who has a Privacy Policy in black and white in our manual and on our website.
Now if you have questions about our intentions, just ask, but don't make things up. And yes, TiVo is proud to use Linux at our core.
Richard Bullwinkle TiVo Webmaster
Re: BSOD crap is getting old
by
IntlHarvester
·
· Score: 2
I can believe it. (A peril of GDI in the kernel.) --
Huh? What does Linux have to do with open source? No one ever said the hardware manufacturers are going to release their specs or drivers as open source.
If hardware manufacturers want their hardware to be available to the most users, they will make it part of the Linux kernel.
If they don't, and they provide online module drivers, people will not want to buy their hardware as much. Those companies that release specs will do better than those that don't.
Linux's Open Source nature certainly makes a big different in driver quality. Drivers for Linux tend to get better much faster than if we were forced to deal with the hardware manufacturer alone. Hardware manufacturers are selling hardware, not software. What should they care if their release specs or not? The ones with a clue don't care.
But the latency is going to be higher than with ISDN or ADSL or cable or anything like that. I.E., your telnets won't feel any faster using EQL or anything like that.
I think that the one anonymous coward that has been posting all of the flamebait, without any apparent knowledge of linux, and with terrible spelling (especially for someone with a degree!) should be outed. People posting crap like this will mean the end of allowing Anon Cowards, as everyone will have to register.
So, someone, look at the logs of postings, find out the IP address of the poster, and block it. We don't need these kind of irresponsible lies. Sure, WinCE might have a place somewhere, but it is way too overspecced in some areas, and underspecced in others. It is just a less bloated version of Win95 in the end. Cheap M$ crappy software.
Hmmm, and running WinCE in a remote control. Yeah right. Whack that 4Meg ROM in there, a nice 100MHz processor, 640x240 colour screen. Your lies are so pathetic they make me laugh. Go away, and read ZDnet.
On topic now...
This system looks like nothing else. Shame it isn't really a video recorder device, more of a video delay device, but having 4-30 hours of delay! Heck, whack in one of those 250Gig drives and get 300+ hours of delay!
The use of Linux is by the by, the company obviously found it to be the best solution, although I would have thought a dedicated RTOS such as QNX would have been much more suitable.
Actually its a Dual Pentium II 350 system with a half gig RAM.
But that's irrelavent. I didn't say a thing about watching video, I was asking about hardware assisted or pure software MPEG2 codecs, preferably a full hardware encoding solution. Obviously the Tivo has custom MPEG hardware tied into the unit -- I don't think you could get a PowerPC chip with the kind of power you need for software MPEG2 encoding and still get a drive and crap for $500.
The piece of hardware you'd need to duplicate this functionality on your home Linux system is that hardware MPEG2 encoding/decoding hardware. You can get crap to do MPEG1, but anyone who's ever watched MPEG1 against MPEG2 knows that MPEG1 is barely useful for this sort of an appplication.
I'm guessing since noone has ever jumped out with an answer to my question any of the times I've asked it on here, such a beast either doesn't exist or isn't very common.
There's lots of TV cards supported. I've never seen one that could do hardware-based MPEG2 (or MPEG2 quality) compression at full 720x512 resolution at 30fps. Such hardware exists -- its used for PC-based video editing and production systems, but none of the ones I've ever seen are supported under Linux.
My guess is the TiVo uses a hardware MPEG2 solution. I didn't think prices had come down that far on MPEG2 encoders, but aparently they have. (Last time I priced one it was around $18k, and that was only a few years ago...)
>NT BSODs about the same as Linux does it's lovely >kernel panics.
In four years of having a linux box up 24/7, programming and writing on it 6-14 hrs day, 6 days a week, and using either the latest stable kernel or a mid to late development kernel, I have *never* seen a panic, save for the day when we were going down the list of scsi drivers trying to figure out which one would work wiht our screwball drivers (no, this isn't the recommended way of doing it, but when you scrounge from the spare parts bin, you takes what you gets).
4 years, not one panic. While there are exceptions (usually due to hardware failure), this experience seems to be typical.
I saw one kernel panic in about six months an a mac IIci running macbsd (netbsd), which was (apparently) related to an incomplete/late-alpha driver for X.
And FreeBSD 3.1 would panic on boot about 20% of the time if there was an extended partition with linux partitions on the ide disk. It would also corrupted on write to ext2fs often enough to be unusable.
3.2 has solved the first, and I've never tried the second. Unfortuneately, trying to write to a bad floppy drive sends it into an endless loop of failure, which eventually brings the whole system down, and prevents the hard drives from being proprly dismounted. Linux has no problem with this drive (it gets the errors, but doesn't kill them).
Yes, kernel panics do exist. No, the normal user doesn't ever see them. Kernel developers see them, and folks configuring hardware drivers without the docs see them. But the overwhelming majority of regular users never do, while I've never met a windows user that hasn't seen at least several crashes, if not several every week.
You can enter the message with the up-down controls, letter by letter, and it has a stupid green blinking light to signal its existance.
Yes, it's dumb, so just todn't use it, right? Wrong, toughcing the button sets the feature. And there's no way to disable it again short of power-cycling the VCR. And once that buttons been touched, *every* other control save the power button ceases working until you touch it again, giving you the green blinky back. And with two 17 month olds in the room, a green blinky gets touched again . . .
And then there's the screw-up with the dates and programming. I forget exactly how it happens, but its to the effect of crossing a month boundary backwards. The first time doesn't change the day of the month, but only the day of the week. The second attempt crosses both. Congratulations, you now have a date that cannot happen, and cannot delete this recording program until fixing it, which you cannot do, since all changes effect day of week and month. You have lost this programming slot until you power cycle the vcr.
>It has come to my attention that an AC claims the >following. >Ph.D. in economics and a Masters in Business >administration.
I seriously doubt that he does. Look at his analysis, it's nonsense, and he couldn't pass the qualifying exams in micro at even a third rate school with it.
He has hopelessly confused the number of people on the demand-side of the market with the quantity demanded, missing entirely that demand is a function, while the quantity demanded is the value of that function at some point. Futher, windows and wince are separate products, and there is no reason to assume that the two are complements.
But then, I'm still six weeks from having a real Ph.D. in economics, so I suppose I should defer to the phony claims and stick to being an authority on law:)
Okay, I've asked this three or four times in various threads on Slashdot, and twice submitted Ask Slashdot questions. Maybe this time an answer will present itself.
Does anyone know of ANY video hardware supported under Linux that supports any sort of medium to high bitrate video codecs? Any hardware that can do MPEG2? Or software?
I recall a VCR that came out sometime from 1990-1994 that was able to cut out commercials while it recorded: Watching the tape later, you'd get a blue screen for about 3 seconds and then it would jump back to normal programming. It was a terrific innovation, and I was seriously considering picking one up.
It got sued almost immediately, by about 50 different companies or organizations. It never went into mass production, and the company that designed it was never heard from again.
This is the last thing that advertisers want to see--it takes away their ability to force feed commercials (which is how TV stations get the large majority of their revenue) down the viewers' throats. They hit the designers, and they hit them hard.
I'm hoping and praying that the same sort of thing doesn't happen here, because it's the first step in going to digital VCR boxes and the like.
-- -...and remember, you can't invade Brainania. It's not on the big map.
Re:I have 8 WinCE devices at home
by
Glith
·
· Score: 2
How many anonymous cowards does it take to post 3 comments that agree with themselves?
only one, of course!
Guess we're already seeing the anti-Linux guys at work.
Re: BSOD crap is getting old
by
IntlHarvester
·
· Score: 2
And were those Windows 9x BSOD or a Windows NT BSODs?
The reason I ask is that it seems that Linux users are honestly confused on the issue. Win 9x (with only some memory protection) can blue screen on normal user programs. It takes a kernel fault on Windows NT to produce the blue screen, which was the point the original poster was trying to make when comparing a BSOD to a Linux panic.
The worst thing I've seen a user space program such as Netscape or Word do on NT is to take down the entire user session and drop back to the logon screen (assuming you don't have a hardware problem). Similar things happen under Linux.
Now, of course, there's more stuff in the NT kernel to crash (graphics drivers, file sharing, IIS, extra bits of poor programming, etc.). And the STOP message should tell you what crashed. If you can't isolate the problem down to something more specific than "windows", that's simply bad troubleshooting on your part. Perhaps it's the same defective RAM that was troubling your Linux setup. (Most NT bscreens are hardware/driver related.)
I'm only making this point because on this "news for nerds" site, people can get away with saying "BSODs three times a day!" without giving any specific information. If someone posted "The Linux Kernel PANICS all the time!! ", they'd be certainly called on it.
Now it could be your talking about Windows 98. If so, who cares? *Every* OS on the market today is more stable than Win98.
Are you sure you want to get excited about this?
by
AlienJ
·
· Score: 5
This Tivo thing is evil - check this out at Wired. Go for the ReplayTV or wait a bit for the STB MPEG2 recorder card then write your own apps. Sorry, I dont want anyone to have a clue what I watch on TV....
Info on the changes made to the kernel...
by
_Stryker
·
· Score: 3
I did a little research and sent an email to the TiVo folks. Here is what they had to say. Enjoy...
Subject: RE: Operating System used for TiVo? Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 17:19:11 -0700
Dear Sean,
Yes, it's Linux, and your timing is perfect. We just got finished creating our Tar.balls. I can get you the exact details of the code that is available per the GPL, but basically it is performance tweaks, and priority tweaks, to make Linux more of a Real-time OS. There is also a bunch of stuff to make it work with our transactional file system, and other stuff. I'll try to get you the full details, and if you want a burn of the CD, I'll try to get that ready, too. We are going to charge some nominal fee for this, but I'm not sure what that is, yet.
Oh, all tweaks are for Linux on the PowerPC chip.
Let me know if you have any specific questions.
Cheers, Richard Bullwinkle TiVo Webmaster
-----Original Message----- From: sean@sks-pc.cs.kau.se [mailto:sean@sks-pc.cs.kau.se]On Behalf Of Sean Kendall Schneyer Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 4:56 PM To: CustomerCare@TiVo.com Subject: Operating System used for TiVo?
I read in a recent article that you were using Linux as the operating system for TiVo. I was unable to find anything to confirm this on your website however. Is Linux actually being used? If so, what changes were needed to the kernel to support your device? Is the source code for these changes available (required under the GPL)? I would be very interested in receiving more details.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks to some wheeling and dealing on their part, you can apparently plug these things into the glorified serial ports on most DSS^H^H^HDIRECTV systems. This is actually useful since it lets the box control things without resorting to IR blasters and the like. They can probably ASK the receiver if it successfully landed on channel 401 so you don't miss your favorite porno.
Lots of stuff out there runs Linux. Some companies don't tell you about it, but some probing will reveal the true Penguin Nature hidden within.
Simply put, Linux provides a solid foundation without having all the restrictive licensing funkiness from Microsoft. Besides, why pay Redmond a fee per box when you could be using that money to undersell your competition (or, better yet, lining your pockets with it)?
The Cobalt Cube and these set-top boxes are only the beginning. It may not always be superficially recognizable as such, but pretty soon Linux will be living in the homes of everyone in the world who has electricity. Global domination, indeed.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
that would be VHDR or VFRR instead of VCR :)
-Doviende
"The value of a man resides in what he gives,
and not in what he is capable of receiving."
"The value of a man resides in what he gives,
and not in what he is capable of receiving."
--Albert Einstein
I've read about Sony using a modified gcc with some added targets to compile code for their game machines so it's not that surprising though that free software is taken into the world of embedded system.
Often, when developing an embedded system, you can spend weeks or months just building the first stages of an embedded system that can support some application. If you instead choose to port the Linux kernel or make gcc able to compile native code for the CPU of your choice, they you have already gained several months of development.
Unfortunately, I have been in the situation recently where I have had to deal with Windows CE and I can say for a fact that I didn't very much like the experience. I'd honestly rather spend some time porting gcc so I can compile native code.
How would you feel about readline support on your remote control? Alan Cox recently wrote in his diary that he couldn't believe how Unix vendors can ship ancient shells without cursor control or job control with their systems. Well, I can't believe my stereo remote control still won't let me schedule playlists!
Humm.
I have read most of the posts since folks on Slashdot first started praising and bashing us. I have found that responsible poster just ask before they flame!
For the record, TiVo does not upload any information about you or the shows you watch. All the math is done inside the box. We, along with our partners, are the only PTV company who has no plans for downloading Ads to the box, and we are the only PTV company who has a Privacy Policy in black and white in our manual and on our website.
Now if you have questions about our intentions, just ask, but don't make things up. And yes, TiVo is proud to use Linux at our core.
Richard Bullwinkle
TiVo Webmaster
I can believe it. (A peril of GDI in the kernel.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Huh? What does Linux have to do with open source? No one ever said the hardware manufacturers are going to release their specs or drivers as open source.
If hardware manufacturers want their hardware to be available to the most users, they will make it part of the Linux kernel.
If they don't, and they provide online module drivers, people will not want to buy their hardware as much. Those companies that release specs will do better than those that don't.
Linux's Open Source nature certainly makes a big different in driver quality. Drivers for Linux tend to get better much faster than if we were forced to deal with the hardware manufacturer alone. Hardware manufacturers are selling hardware, not software. What should they care if their release specs or not? The ones with a clue don't care.
But the latency is going to be higher than with ISDN or ADSL or cable or anything like that. I.E., your telnets won't feel any faster using EQL or anything like that.
I think that the one anonymous coward that has been posting all of the flamebait, without any apparent knowledge of linux, and with terrible spelling (especially for someone with a degree!) should be outed. People posting crap like this will mean the end of allowing Anon Cowards, as everyone will have to register.
So, someone, look at the logs of postings, find out the IP address of the poster, and block it. We don't need these kind of irresponsible lies. Sure, WinCE might have a place somewhere, but it is way too overspecced in some areas, and underspecced in others. It is just a less bloated version of Win95 in the end. Cheap M$ crappy software.
Hmmm, and running WinCE in a remote control. Yeah right. Whack that 4Meg ROM in there, a nice 100MHz processor, 640x240 colour screen. Your lies are so pathetic they make me laugh. Go away, and read ZDnet.
On topic now...
This system looks like nothing else. Shame it isn't really a video recorder device, more of a video delay device, but having 4-30 hours of delay! Heck, whack in one of those 250Gig drives and get 300+ hours of delay!
The use of Linux is by the by, the company obviously found it to be the best solution, although I would have thought a dedicated RTOS such as QNX would have been much more suitable.
Actually its a Dual Pentium II 350 system with a half gig RAM.
But that's irrelavent. I didn't say a thing about watching video, I was asking about hardware assisted or pure software MPEG2 codecs, preferably a full hardware encoding solution. Obviously the Tivo has custom MPEG hardware tied into the unit -- I don't think you could get a PowerPC chip with the kind of power you need for software MPEG2 encoding and still get a drive and crap for $500.
The piece of hardware you'd need to duplicate this functionality on your home Linux system is that hardware MPEG2 encoding/decoding hardware. You can get crap to do MPEG1, but anyone who's ever watched MPEG1 against MPEG2 knows that MPEG1 is barely useful for this sort of an appplication.
I'm guessing since noone has ever jumped out with an answer to my question any of the times I've asked it on here, such a beast either doesn't exist or isn't very common.
There's lots of TV cards supported. I've never seen one that could do hardware-based MPEG2 (or MPEG2 quality) compression at full 720x512 resolution at 30fps. Such hardware exists -- its used for PC-based video editing and production systems, but none of the ones I've ever seen are supported under Linux.
:)
My guess is the TiVo uses a hardware MPEG2 solution. I didn't think prices had come down that far on MPEG2 encoders, but aparently they have. (Last time I priced one it was around $18k, and that was only a few years ago...)
I want one on a PCI card.
>NT BSODs about the same as Linux does it's lovely
>kernel panics.
In four years of having a linux box up 24/7, programming and writing on it 6-14 hrs day, 6 days a week, and using either the latest stable kernel or a mid to late development kernel, I have *never* seen a panic, save for the day when we were going down the list of scsi drivers trying to figure out which one would work wiht our screwball drivers (no, this isn't the recommended way of doing it, but when you scrounge from the spare parts bin, you takes what you gets).
4 years, not one panic. While there are exceptions (usually due to hardware failure), this experience seems to be typical.
I saw one kernel panic in about six months an a mac IIci running macbsd (netbsd), which was (apparently) related to an incomplete/late-alpha driver for X.
And FreeBSD 3.1 would panic on boot about 20% of the time if there was an extended partition with linux partitions on the ide disk. It would also corrupted on write to ext2fs often enough to be unusable.
3.2 has solved the first, and I've never tried the second. Unfortuneately, trying to write to a bad floppy drive sends it into an endless loop of failure, which eventually brings the whole system down, and prevents the hard drives from being proprly dismounted. Linux has no problem with this drive (it gets the errors, but doesn't kill them).
Yes, kernel panics do exist. No, the normal user doesn't ever see them. Kernel developers see them, and folks configuring hardware drivers without the docs see them. But the overwhelming majority of regular users never do, while I've never met a windows user that hasn't seen at least several crashes, if not several every week.
Eventually, you mostly learn to work around it.
But it has this *stupid* "feature."
You can enter the message with the up-down controls, letter by letter, and it has a stupid green blinking light to signal its existance.
Yes, it's dumb, so just todn't use it, right? Wrong, toughcing the button sets the feature. And there's no way to disable it again short of power-cycling the VCR. And once that buttons been touched, *every* other control save the power button ceases working until you touch it again, giving you the green blinky back. And with two 17 month olds in the room, a green blinky gets touched again . . .
And then there's the screw-up with the dates and programming. I forget exactly how it happens, but its to the effect of crossing a month boundary backwards. The first time doesn't change the day of the month, but only the day of the week. The second attempt crosses both. Congratulations, you now have a date that cannot happen, and cannot delete this recording program until fixing it, which you cannot do, since all changes effect day of week and month. You have lost this programming slot until you power cycle the vcr.
>It has come to my attention that an AC claims the >following.
:)
>Ph.D. in economics and a Masters in Business
>administration.
I seriously doubt that he does. Look at his analysis, it's nonsense, and he couldn't pass the qualifying exams in micro at even a third rate school with it.
He has hopelessly confused the number of people on the demand-side of the market with the quantity demanded, missing entirely that demand is a function, while the quantity demanded is the value of that function at some point. Futher, windows and wince are separate products, and there is no reason to assume that the two are complements.
But then, I'm still six weeks from having a real Ph.D. in economics, so I suppose I should defer to the phony claims and stick to being an authority on law
Okay, I've asked this three or four times in various threads on Slashdot, and twice submitted Ask Slashdot questions. Maybe this time an answer will present itself.
Does anyone know of ANY video hardware supported under Linux that supports any sort of medium to high bitrate video codecs? Any hardware that can do MPEG2? Or software?
MPEG1 doesn't really hack it.
I recall a VCR that came out sometime from 1990-1994 that was able to cut out commercials while it recorded: Watching the tape later, you'd get a blue screen for about 3 seconds and then it would jump back to normal programming. It was a terrific innovation, and I was seriously considering picking one up.
It got sued almost immediately, by about 50 different companies or organizations. It never went into mass production, and the company that designed it was never heard from again.
This is the last thing that advertisers want to see--it takes away their ability to force feed commercials (which is how TV stations get the large majority of their revenue) down the viewers' throats. They hit the designers, and they hit them hard.
I'm hoping and praying that the same sort of thing doesn't happen here, because it's the first step in going to digital VCR boxes and the like.
-
How many anonymous cowards does it take to post 3 comments that agree with themselves?
only one, of course!
Guess we're already seeing the anti-Linux guys at work.
And were those Windows 9x BSOD or a Windows NT BSODs?
The reason I ask is that it seems that Linux users are honestly confused on the issue. Win 9x (with only some memory protection) can blue screen on normal user programs. It takes a kernel fault on Windows NT to produce the blue screen, which was the point the original poster was trying to make when comparing a BSOD to a Linux panic.
The worst thing I've seen a user space program such as Netscape or Word do on NT is to take down the entire user session and drop back to the logon screen (assuming you don't have a hardware problem). Similar things happen under Linux.
Now, of course, there's more stuff in the NT kernel to crash (graphics drivers, file sharing, IIS, extra bits of poor programming, etc.). And the STOP message should tell you what crashed. If you can't isolate the problem down to something more specific than "windows", that's simply bad troubleshooting on your part. Perhaps it's the same defective RAM that was troubling your Linux setup. (Most NT bscreens are hardware/driver related.)
I'm only making this point because on this "news for nerds" site, people can get away with saying "BSODs three times a day!" without giving any specific information. If someone posted "The Linux Kernel PANICS all the time!! ", they'd be certainly called on it.
Now it could be your talking about Windows 98. If so, who cares? *Every* OS on the market today is more stable than Win98.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This Tivo thing is evil - check this out at Wired. Go for the ReplayTV or wait a bit for the STB MPEG2 recorder card then write your own apps. Sorry, I dont want anyone to have a clue what I watch on TV....
I did a little research and sent an email to the TiVo folks. Here is what they had to say. Enjoy...
Subject: RE: Operating System used for TiVo?
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 17:19:11 -0700
Dear Sean,
Yes, it's Linux, and your timing is perfect. We just got finished creating our Tar.balls.
I can get you the exact details of the code that is available per the GPL, but basically it
is performance tweaks, and priority tweaks, to make Linux more of a Real-time OS. There is
also a bunch of stuff to make it work with our transactional file system, and other stuff.
I'll try to get you the full details, and if you want a burn of the CD, I'll try to get that
ready, too. We are going to charge some nominal fee for this, but I'm not sure what that
is, yet.
Oh, all tweaks are for Linux on the PowerPC chip.
Let me know if you have any specific questions.
Cheers,
Richard Bullwinkle
TiVo Webmaster
-----Original Message-----
From: sean@sks-pc.cs.kau.se [mailto:sean@sks-pc.cs.kau.se]On Behalf Of
Sean Kendall Schneyer
Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 4:56 PM
To: CustomerCare@TiVo.com
Subject: Operating System used for TiVo?
I read in a recent article that you were using Linux as the
operating system for TiVo. I was unable to find anything to
confirm this on your website however. Is Linux actually
being used? If so, what changes were needed to the kernel
to support your device? Is the source code for these changes
available (required under the GPL)? I would be very interested
in receiving more details.
Thanks in advance,
Sean Kendall Schneyer
---