Friday, April 13, 2012

Part 3 - How to get the most out of the Hama Internet TV Box - Installing Busybox



As you remember from Part 2 we had to use "cat" instead of "cp" to copy files because the default Android installation lacks a lot of useful command line tools. Now it's time to change that so that future modifications will be a bit easier to perform.

For this I used this Busybox installer.

(Busybox is single binary file that contains many other common linux/unix commands and it's often used in embedded systems instead of using a separate binary for each command.)

But first we need to prepare the file system because there are no /system/xbin folder on the Hama Internet TV Box.

  1. Start Terminal Emulator and make yourself root. ("su" command).
  2. Run the "mount" command without any parameters and check which partition is mounted on /system (on my device it is /dev/block/mmcblk0p2 and likely it is the same for you)
  3. Remount /system as read-write with "mount -o rw,remount /dev/block/mmcblk0p2 /system"
  4. Create the /system/xbin folder with "mkdir /system/xbin".
  5. Install and run the Busybox installer from Google Play using the default settings (just push "install").

What will happen is that the busybox installer will install busybox into /system/xbin and create lots of symlinks for common linux/unix commands. (type "ls -l /system/xbin" to see what the installer added to your system)

We will use "cp" command and the busybox version of the "mount" command in the next part when we will make Google Play "see more" apps as compatible with our box.

Disclaimer: This operation will most likely void your warranty and is done completely at your own risk.

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