After much reading, more confused

[Flathed]

I want to hack my Toshiba TX-20 without cracking the case if possible. I did a lot of research here and found myself reading in circles, finding "the zipper" seems to be what I need, then realizing it's for Direct tivos. Most posters here are far beyond the nOOb stage and the terms I see make no sense to me. Is there a glossery of terms that I can't find? I think I want to telnet into my wirelessly networked Tivo. Is telnetting the same as having the Tivo drive physically hooked to your computer? Terms I'm confused about how to access, or their purpose:
Bash
Shell
telnet
Tivoweb

Any help would be appreciated, there's probably a sticky somewhere I missed.

[stevel]

You can't hack without opening the case and pulling the drive. Telnet is a way of "logging in" to a networked system so that you can execute commands. To do so with a TiVo requires making changes to the software on the hard drive. "shell" is a general term on UNIX and Linux systems (TiVos are Linux-based) for the program that reads commands and displays the output. There are several variants of these, "bash" is the one TiVos use. TiVoWeb is a program that runs on hacked TiVos and lets you use a web browser to do things on a TiVo such as rename shows.

The "Underground" section of this forum is where hacking is discussed. There are also some good books on the topic.

[Flathed]

Thank you very much Steve.