Finally got a chance a few nights ago to try out a recent version of Galleon, a media server type app that you run on a Windows, Linux, or Mac and then expose various “applications” to a TiVo Series 2 or 3. I had heard about a new alpha version (with preliminary HD support) on TiVoBlog.com and had been meaning to try it for a while.

Written in Java, it works on Windows, Linux, or Mac. I tried it on Linux – specifically an Ubuntu 7.04 system. Downloading and running it was simple as I already had the required Java 5 JRE (I have sun-java5-jre and sun-java5-jdk installed). A script called run.sh launches the server and another called gui.sh launches a configuration GUI.

Not everything worked for me. There’s an application called “Desktop” that’s supposed to let you view your computer’s desktop from your TiVo, but for me it showed a blank screen. I also initially had trouble with the email application which lets you view email on your TiVo from POP and IMAP servers. The server app was emitting Java exceptions for inability to load classes from the JavaBeans Activation Framework (JAF). I fixed this by apt-get installing libgnujaf-java (an open-source JAF package) and then creating a symlink to the /usr/share/java/activation.jar file in the Galleon lib directory.

The Photos application was the most obviously useful application to me – I’ll have to try some of the others. There are many apps for handling various kinds of media including music, iTunes playlists, movies, photos, etc.