I wanted to equip my AppleTV with faster ethernet, so i ordered one of these as the are linked in the wiki.

The seller insured to me that this adapter has an ASIX 88178 chipset inside, so what could possibly go wrong?

But for now, i have no idea how to install these on my Apple TV. I inserted it into the USB Port. But ifconfig does not show any new interfaces, i don't understand the output of dmesg, and OpenELEC does not have lspci on board. When i selectet eth1 as the primary network adapter, i can't get no IP. However, the lights of this adapter start flashing when i insert a lan cable, and the switch on the other side of the cable tells me that there is some device connected.

I connected this adapter to my Macbook, and there it shows up as "USB Gigabit Ethernet", but it seems that my macbook does not plug-and-play install this adapter either.

There was a CD with this adapter with driver and manual, but it was a mini cd, and i only have slot-in drives here, which aren't capable of reading this CD. However, there was a printed manual, too, and it said that windows would be able to plug-and-play this adapter.

But, please, tell me: How do i install this adapter on my apple tv?

ifconfig will not show a new device until the OS loads a driver. lspci *is* in the OS but won't show anything useful for USB devices, you run "lsusb" for that. The manual you didn't read will tell you that MacOS requires a driver to be installed before the adapter will work, and the fact that it will be plug and play in Windows has no value *whatsoever* for OpenELEC which is Linux.

So, it would probably help if you shared those logs you don't understand otherwise we (who do understand them) can only make wild guesses at what the problem is. Please share the following via pastebin:

lsusb
ifconfig
/var/log/messages
/var/lib/connman/default.profile
/storage/.xbmc/userdata/addon_data/os.openelec.settings/settings.xml

Well, the printed guide didn't tell it. And i assumed that "plug and play under windows" and "openelec does support it" meant "plug and play under openelec", since linux has a little plug and play compatibility as well.

However:

lsusb: http://pastebin.com/5GBBkdyM
ifconfig: http://pastebin.com/UUQNmYeY
/var/log/messages: http://pastebin.com/Ff8PRcep
/var/lib/connman/default.profile: http://pastebin.com/2sdxy14Z
/storage/.xbmc/userdata/...: http://pastebin.com/5Ni4uizM

lsusb doesn't show an ASIX device connected. If it *was* connected either your USB port or the USB device is not working properly .. and /var/log/messages is incomplete so even if it was connected the log wouldn't show us anything useful. Logs can be rotated so you need to share them after a clean boot, not 5 hours after a clean boot when all the useful startup data is no longer in them.

So i rebooted. The device has flashing LEDs and the switch recognizes it.
lsusb: pastebin.com/yC4jqhLF
ifconfig: pastebin.com/eH89xDJL
messages: pastebin.com/0HR1mvsH

default.profile and settings.xml are the same.

My USB port is working, because it recognizes any usb drive inserted.

I missed the obvious clue in the lsusb output the first time as I was looking for mentions of ASIX. Your USB NIC device is connected, but it's not an ASIX device. The USB ID's match THIS SMC chipset. According to THIS page it's supported by the Linux kernel so adding this to a future release is trivial. Please file a driver request via the github issues tracker that mentions this thread, the lsusb output and the link to the kernel config page.