SlingPlayer running on AppleTV

I absolutely love my AppleTV, the kids love watching photos and home movies, video podcasts, etc – we love rarely having to go to Blockbuster to rent movies, and we also love having complete control over our family’s television viewing (we canceled our cable and save that money and avoid the junk out there, occasionally buying a show to watch…wished they would lower the cost down from 1.99, but oh well! we spend time as a family doing other things.)

With our cable cancelled, we have a slingbox for those must-see shows, foxnews, and recorded programs. We watch it on our iMac and even have connected my MacbookPro to our 50″ plasma TV for the important stuff.

I have been wishing we could watch our slingbox on our AppleTV and finally we can!! I have been following this thread and finally greg Rice posted easy to follow instructions how to do this: How_to_install_SlingPlayer_on_AppleTV. Thanks greg!!!

It works! I did not do the reset he suggested and did not need the recovery.dmg. Also I had to create the folders Applications and Documents in the frontrow user folder on the ATV. I was tripped up a little at first when I didn’t see the mouse and the keyboard didn’t work…until I realized you don’t see these until you launch SlingPlayer and focus is on the MultiFinder.

A tip: I was able to change window position to center it by changing the window position of slingplayer on my macbook, exporting preferences and importing those preferences on the slingplayer on ATV (after copying that exported file to the ATV of course). I tried having it startup in full screen but that caused occasional crashes.

One last note: sound does not come out through my optical out, but it did come through the HDMI connection to the TV.

JUST IN TIME FOR MARCH MADNESS – YESS!!!!

Installing Bugzilla 3.0.2 on Lunarpages shared hosting

Reference: Bugzilla Guide 3.0.2

1. Using FTP client, upload bugzilla tarball to LP (placed in the parent folder to where you want bugzilla to be homed. I put mine in the root www folder public_html so it will expand to a subfolder and run from http://mydomain.com/bugzilla.

2. Using LP’s Cpanel File Manager, navigate to uploaded tarball, select the filename and extract (see file operations on right)

3. Noticing the new folder created, select this folder name, and rename to bugzilla.

4. For this same folder, select Permissions and change to 775.

5. The install script ./checksetup.pl must be run using cron jobs since we do not have shell access on this box. In Cpanel, go to cron jobs and enter a job to run once:

cd '/home/youracct/public_html/bugzilla' ; ./checksetup.pl

Also specify your email that you want the output to be sent to. Schedule it to run a few minutes from current time, and make sure it runs only once.

6. Wait for email, the script will have checked for required perl modules.

7. If required or desired modules are missing, email support.lunarpages.com or open a ticket with them and ask them to install the modules on your server.

8. Once all modules are present that you need, edit the localconfig file per the installation instructions. Also, using the Cpanel Mysql tool you will need to create a database and a database user for this application. I created a db called bugs and of course it was renamed to account-id_bugs. The same with the username. These database values are needed in the localconfig file. I edited my localconfig file with the Cpanel file manager.

ISSUE RAISED TO LP TECH SUPPORT: apache is not running under the group ‘apache’ or ‘www-data’. Last resort will be to use “” as the $webservergroup value in localconfig.

Once resolved, the remaining steps will be completed.

LP ANSWER: You must run the install script with $webservergroup = “”

9. Additional steps required since we’re in a shared environment and the install script doesn’t always complete:

• edit the .htaccess file in the root bugzilla folder to include these two lines:

DirectoryIndex index.cgi
Options FollowSymLinks ExecCGI

10. Edit the cronjob to run checksetup.pl non-interactively since we don’t have a shell. This is done by using an answer file (see here). You’ll have to create this answers file and put it in the same directory as checksetup.pl.

cd '/home/youracct/public_html/bugzilla' ; ./checksetup.pl answersfile.txt --verbose


11. Rerun the cron job, same script, it will detect the edited localconfig file and run the installation script. You should get db tables created. Inspect the email results for errors.

Now you can login as the admin user and start configuration!!

Note: The script did not like my answers file and I always got a “bad file descriptor” error. Here’s my workaround:

Run the cron job without the answers file, it will create the db tables, etc and wait for user input for the admin user. At some point it will die or you can kill it with another cron job.  At this point the bugzilla site is accessible but there are no users defined. Go to main page and create a new user that you will use as the admin. Once created, submit this cron job that will make the new user admin and then it will complete the remaining installation steps of the script:

cd '/home/youracct/public_html/bugzilla' ; ./checksetup.pl --make-admin=newuser@domain.com

Enjoy!!