So I picked up this little guy from a CompUSA clearance rack for something like $20. I had read about some guy who hacked his MSNTV 2 to run Linux and it seemed like something fun to do if I were ever bored. Well I downloaded all the necessary files except for the most significant one, the hacked BIOS image. He claimed he couldn't post it for fear of getting sued (I don't blame him, this is Microsoft) so I searched high and low for it. After a few weeks I gave up and shelved it.
Not too long ago a friend of mine showed me the wonders of coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS). These crazy guys from the Cluster Research Lab needed a way to quickly boot up a cluster node and got fed of with all the nonsense that the traditional PC BIOS tended to have and decided that they'd write their own BIOS using..what else? Linux. Since they opened the source up it relatively quickly became a viable BIOS for a number of boards. The board in the MSNTV 2 (RM4100) happens to be one of those boards. Whoo hoo!
So if you don't know me personally you won't know that I tend to start on projects and then get bored before they're finished, which kinda sucks, but that's just who I am. The purpose of writing about this therefore is to 1) Document the process (although really I'm just following the awesome documentation that I found at settoplinux.org) and 2) Force myself to finish this project in the event someone is actually reading this. ;-)
