(with pictures!)

Last night, me and Clockwork (who’s been commenting here occasionally) spent a couple of hours getting Linux on an old DBox2 (warning: German) he managed to get his hands on. The DBox is a set-top box, basically any of three DVB receivers manufactured by Nokia, Sagem and Philips and is being distributed mainly by Germany’s largest PayTV provider Premiere.

The process of getting Linux to run on it involves connecting it to a PC with a null modem and (!) a LAN cable and getting it to start up in a debugging mode. From there, you can overwrite the flash memory chip that holds its operating system (which is programmed in, I kid you not, Java) with basically anything you like. Seeing as how the CPU is a PowerPC, it didn’t take long for Linux to be ported. There’s a couple of different GUIs for it, although from what I’ve seen Neutrino (German again) is the most usable of them. The final feature set involves being able to watch streaming video via LAN, recording video from the TV tuner to a hard drive via LAN, mp3/ogg playback and a picture viewer. Basically, a much more full-featured home entertainment device than what it starts out as. More >