It looks like the Apple TV is going to feature Tux on its hood beside the pervasive Apple logo. Some ingenious hackers claim that they have wrought a custom Linux kernel on Apple TV's boot loader. The info is still incomplete but as it is, the kernel and the set-top box seem to have WiFi, SpeedStep and EFI. Other kernel status statistics:

• EFI is not working fully
• USB works with the "irqpoll" kernel commadnline option
• nv Xorg driver works
• nvidia's propritiary driver also works with full 3D accel
• Speedstep seems to work. The CPU Clock gets down to 600 MHz
• Wlan is working with ndiswrapper
• Sound works fine

Just for fun, we'd like to quote to you the spoof Apple marketing campaign that appeared on the Linux users' site when Linux was hacked into a Mac Book.

The Intel chip... For months, it's been trapped inside a Mac, inside a pretty little box, dutifully performing pretty little tasks when it could have been doing so much more. Starting today, the Intel chip will be set free, and get to live life in a Mac... running Linux. Imagine the possibilities.

We've seen one too many iPhone analysis articles now. What's with all the hype? It's all needed, though, for the fate of millions of Apple company investors and employees rely on the success of this spotlighted product.

The latest news on the iPhone hype has financial researchers assuring Apple investors that iPhone, iPod and Mac sales would continue pushing the company forward. iPod holds a 24 percent share on the world market for media players, a figure thought to rise by half a percentage point. Mac sales is seen to go up by the upcoming launch of the Mac OS X Leopard.

But all this hype on the iPhone could give rise to a dilemma for the giant electronics company - the iPhone could rival the iPod. It may seem silly knowing as how both products are by the same company, but iPhone could greatly affect iPod sales and thus, the financial health of Apple.

Other factors that would greatly affect Apple money health are negative issues on the iPhone - if they are to come. The analysts warn against negative news, delays, quality or usability issues - these can all easily damage Apple reputation and it's stock.

Truly, we sometimes cannot picture such so-so things as rumor and delays to affect something as tangible as money and stocks. But they are highly correlated. Such is the business of the finance world.

Retail company Best Buy dropped Macs from their lineup of electronic products for sale in 1998, saying that Macs don't really sell that well, but last year we saw a comeback of Apple products on Best Buy stores. The retailer started selling Macs again on 50 of their stores, adding 45 more stores to the list of their Mac-bearing stores late last year.

The positive performance of Mac sales probably boosted Best Buy's confidence in Apple again. In their first quarter earnings conference, Best Buy announced that they will start selling Macs on more of their stores this year. Best Buy president Brian Dunn added that they will be expanding their relationship with Apple this year.

Best Buy's Apple-expansion plan includes selling Macs on 200 of their stores during the latter half of this year. We see this as "practice" for Best Buy, to test the waters before they begin selling Macs in all of their stores again. Analysts say that (of course) Best Buy selling Macs again would mean more sales both for the electronics retailer and the computer manufacturer.

With plans of selling Apple TV on their stores, we share Best Buy's growing confidence in the sales performance of Apple.

The Apple community's been waiting for this. It's been rumored that an eight-core Mac Pro is in the works, now it's a rumor no more. The Apple 8-core Mac Pro is finally here.

Back when the 8-core Mac Pro was still a rumor, it was said that it was going to be released later this year, possibly November. It was released earlier than everyone expected. This newly launched Mac Pro is the world's first 3.0 GHz, 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro. We can't help but get swayed by the tagline on the Apple site: "Consider the bar officially raised."

Mac Pro 8-core boasts advanced performance on workstation graphics, and "unparalleled" expansion in many possible configurations. Simply put, at 3.0 GHz the quad-core Mac Pro runs two times faster than Power Mac G5 Quad. Expansion-wise, it 8-core Mac Pro can accommodate up to four drives and 3TB of storage, eight DIMM slots to fill up with 16 GB of RAM, two Super Drives.

That's a lot of power. We are sure the programmers and software developers are going to be happy with the functions of this one.

   
 

Some people like older systems better than the new ones and sometimes they're right - there's only so much you can do on new systems, you don't always need that much power to get the job done.

A writer, Ted Hodges, is proud to say that he does his writing on an Apple Lisa. Yes, that Apple Lisa, the machine that, while innovative for its graphics user interface, was priced ridiculously high at US $10,000.

Ted proclaims that there are some benefits of the Lisa that you just can't have on a newer computer system. On the Lisa, you don't have to save from time to time. You can turn off the computer anytime you want, even when there are programs running. It does not crash, and whenever there are power break outs, you don't have to worry about your work not being saved.

Of course, the Lisa has its quirks. It's very slow, it doesn't support color, it can't really use any other software except for the 7/7 suite, and it can't go online. But you can only expect so much from a system that came out during the '80s. Back then, the Lisa was a revolutionary thing, a powerful personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI), targeted towards business consumers.

Some may like working on old systems, some would rather die than use anything else than the latest computer build. But being able to use these machines for real work is really what matters; a thing that Ted Hodges just proved with his beloved Lisa.

A bizarre thing happens to European patrons of iTunes online music stores. When a European consumer buys music from the iTunes Belgian store, for example, they may only use a credit card issued by the bank with an address in Belgium. Because of this territorial restrictions, consumers are then limited in their freedom to purchase the songs they want, and where they want it bought. As such, the European commission has opened an antitrust probe into Apple's iTunes and the way it sells music online in coordination with major music companies.

The EU Commission does this probe amidst complaints from consumer groups coming from Germany, France, the Netherlands and Nordic countries. Such groups have demanded Apple to change the rules it imposes on its online music stores.

Apple, meanwhile, responds that the company actually wants to operate a single store for all of Europe. But publishers and music labels alike won't have any of this, as they believe Apple's rights are not all-encompassing. Spokesman Steve Dowling says Apple does not believe it did anything to violate the EU law.

Apple has been given a "statement of objections" by the EU Commission. The electronics giant has two months to answer the questions issued in the letter. If found guilty, Apple may be forced to part with as much as 10 percent of its total world income to pay for the EU fines.

Newsflash: you might want to upgrade your digital audio player to support the AAC format. After all, this is the format to be used by Apple in selling their non-DRM music from EMI from now on, with lots of major music labels expected to follow suit on the months to come.

AAC is known to be the better digital audio format in terms of sound quality compared to the more popular MP3. Yesterday, Apple and EMI announced that they will be selling non-DRM tracks for US$ 1.29 per song. Such songs will be available in the AAC format.

Will your digital audio player support AAC? As of now, Microsoft, Nokia, Sandisk (e200 line), and Sony already include AAC playback on their devices. Those that don't have AAC format support are players from Creative, Toshiba, Cowon, Philips, etc.

Thankfully, upgrading your digital music player to support AAC can be done via firmware update. Just check your manufacturer's support if you want an upgrade.

In the spirit of bringing you more Apple TV-related modifications, we're now gonna show you how to run the full Mac OS X on the Apple TV. semthex from Hackint0sh.org hacked out a replacement to the Mac OS X kernel, side-stepping over certain hardware restrictions that previously made running the Mac OS X on an Apple TV improbable.

Here are the steps to install the full Mac OS X on the Apple TV. Install at your own risk.

1) Remove the drive from the Apple TV
2) Back up your drive! Make an image of it (see the harddrive upgrade tutorial for this)
3) Connect the drive to a regular Mac (use a Firewire or USB drive dock)
4) Install OS X (Intel version) to the drive (we suggest a slim install - no printer drivers etc.)
5) Boot from this drive, and set it up as you would like it. Make sure you do updates so it is at least 10.4.8.
6) Reboot to your normal OS X install.
7) Remove mach_kernel from root of the drive containg the ATV install.
8) Replace it with the customised mach_kernel that youÂ?ll find on Hackint0sh.org.
9) Replace /System/Libary/Coreservices/boot.efiwith the same file from your backup of the Apple TV OS drive (OSBoot partition).
10) Run bless:

bless --folder=/Volumes/OSBoot/System/Library/CoreServices --file=/Volumes/OSBoot/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi --setBoot

11) Delete all the Nvidia kexts (all beginning with NVD, there should be 5) from the target drive (in /System/Library/Extensions).
12) Transfer the drive back to the Apple TV
13) Turn the Apple TV on and cross your fingers...

And you should boot up into Mac OS X. The Apple TV running Mac OS X can use the mouse and the keyboard normally. Use either Front Row or Back Row to watch content.

For a more detailed how-to, check the installation video by clicking on the full article link below.

 

Are you ready for the biggest i-gadget ever? A couple of years back we told you how Apple announced its partnership with some car manufacturers: Acura, Audi, Honda and Volkswagen. These auto makers wanted to put the ever ubiquitous iPod into their stereo systems and Apple obliged. Now, having your car iPod-integrated is already old news.

What's probably fashionable now is having your car name sounding like an Apple product. Only recently Volkswagen released its new iGolf with a big bang. iGolf is just like Volkswagen's best selling model in history, the Golf, only the i-toting model has a matching iPod dock hidden away in an armrest.

The VW iGolf is worth the equivalent of US$ 24,171 in Spain.

Remember when we told you of stuff that the Apple TV is doing that it's not supposed to do: i.e., running Apple TV on a MacBook, and getting the Xvid to work on the Apple TV? Those are only some of what you can do with the help of this extensive tutorial from the Tutorial Ninjas.

The Ninjas made it clear that doing the stuff they specify will have to require you to put apart your precious Apple TV. If you get over that quite iffy part, you will be able to do the following stuff:

• Disable the Firewall
• Enable SSH & VNC
• Playing xvid/divx encoded stuff
• Stopping Watchdog
• Running Applications(Firefox, Centerstage, etc)
• Installing Quartz

All you need is a computer (preferrably an Intel Mac), a torx 10 and a torx 8, a way to hook up a 2.5" hard drive to your computer, and a method of SSHv1 into a box. But remember: you're on your own when you start breaking apart your hardware for these mods; albeit the steps that the Ninjas provided, available on the "via" link below, can be very detailed.