jd's Journal: Explorer 2000 digital cable boxes

The Scientific Atlanta "Explorern 2000" series of digital boxes are intriguing. A mini-Sparc processor, USB, firewire and ethernet ports, an incredibly slow OS (although it's pretty stable - I've only crashed it once), and controls that don't work as expected.

As systems go, the hardware is great, but the coding is horrible. For example, you can't control volume through the box. Huh?!? The signal goes through it, so why not?

What are the ports for? Apparently, nothing. That part of the code was never written.

Poor MPEG encoding makes the box do worse MPEG decoding. Artifacts are commonplace on digital boxes. Anti-aliasing and other smoothing techniques escaped the makers completely.

The more recent "upgrades" are worse, having boot-up times comparable with Windows 2000 on a low-end Pentium.

Enough of the rant. Does anyone know how to upload Linux into this beast of burden, in particular in a way that lets it still work?