Install SU and VI

The prerequisites for these are running SSH on your AppleTV, and having access to an Intel Mac using universal binaries (except for su; see the note below). This assumes you haven't upgraded the SSH version on your AppleTV (which you should: Install_SSH) and therefore can only connect using SSH v1.

Installing su

Note: you don't need to install su to derive its functionality. To obtain a root shell, simply type 'sudo bash' or 'sudo -s' and enter the password. The prompt will change from a dollar sign (bash-2.05b$) to a hash (bash-2.05b#) to indicate the elevated privileges.

su allows you to login as root ([1]). Ordinarily, you'd need to know the root password. Try typing the following to see what I mean:

su -

You are prompted for the root password....

On an OS X box, your administrator user has sudo rights to execute any command and therefore elevate your shell to be root:

sudo su -

You are prompted for your password.

Installing vi

vi is a line editor for making changes to files. On OS X, vim ([2]) is installed by default.

To copy them to your AppleTV, first find them. They are both stored under /usr/bin. If you are using a graphical SSH client, you can drag and drop them to your AppleTV (you'll need to copy them to the frontrow user directory - /Users/frontrow). From the command line:

scp -1 -r /usr/bin/su frontrow@<AppleTVIPAddress>:~/
scp -1 -r /usr/bin/vim frontrow@<AppleTVIPAddress>:~/

Obviously replace <AppleTVIPAddress> with either the IP address or hostname of your AppleTV. The default hostname is 'appletv.local'.

The previous commands copied the files to your AppleTV; now you need to move them to their correct location.

First, ssh into your AppleTV:

ssh -1 frontrow@<AppleTVIPAddress>

When you copied su and vi over from your Mac, you may have inadvertently changed the owner and group of both. To check this:

ls -al

Now verify correct ownership of the files.

-r-sr-xr-x    1 frontrow  frontrow    44164 Jun 12 02:03 su
-rwxr-xr-x    1 frontrow  frontrow  2060380 Jun 12 02:03 vim

If you see 'frontrow' listed where 'root' and 'wheel' should normally be listed, you will want to change the owner and group back to default permissions:

sudo -s
chown root su
chgrp wheel su
chown root vim
chgrp wheel vim

Another 'ls -al' should report this:

-r-sr-xr-x    1 root  wheel    44164 Jun 12 02:03 su
 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  2060380 Jun 12 02:03 vim

You will now need to make the boot volume read-writable, if you have not done so already.

mount -uw /

Now move the files to the correct location:

mv su /usr/bin/su
mv vim /usr/bin/vim

If you're used to executing vi rather than vim, create a symbolic link:

ln -s /usr/bin/vim /usr/bin/vi

Note that this process can also be utilized to install nano on your AppleTV, if you prefer this text editor over vi.