[Gllug] xbox linux

[Sarah Ewen]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2004 at 10:27:46PM +0100, Craig Millar wrote:
> indeed! can anyone explain the benefits of our beloved os on the xbox. 
> for fun, but what is the incentive apart from geek nirvana? just 
> curious, ignore my inflammatory tone.

I've done it too! :) (got to check out the competition).

I went down the chipping route, paid about 27 quid[1] for a chip and 
soldered it on - a bit fiddly but quite doable. The most annoying thing
was getting the right torx driver to get the case off, and wibbling
about on the web looking for a good soldering diagram for the chip.

Depending on the chip, you're not totally unable to play games. My
xbox will play offline games, I just can't connect to xbox live, but
I'm not bothered about that - in fact I have no games whatsoever.
I think I got the Messiah chip - v1. 

As for why you'd want to do it - I've got mine hooked up to my stereo and
run mpd on it (music player daemon). It's nifty - I've got a couple of 
samba shares mounted with loads of music, and now through web/ncurses
local client I can load playlists and/or make new ones. Nice.

The xbox media player is also a fab way to play videos that are shared on
your home network, or stuff on DVD/CD. It's quite polished interface wise,
pulling down covers for films and albums and stacking multi-file films 
and automatically playing the next file for you. Load it up and you get
"My Pictures", "My Videos", "My Music"...even my weather which pulls
weather info off the net for you.

It's a handy PC to have permanently on in the lounge. As Richard said,
it's not utterly quiet, but it's tolerable. 

Linux on the PS2 is great for those who dig the architecture and/or want
to get into console development on interesting hardware. Linux on the
Xbox gives you a very affordable general purpose PC. I think the biggest
down on the xbox is the resolution, should you connect it to a monitor
you'll only get 800x600.

I grabbed a USB converter cable off some web shop, it was pretty cheap.
They're probably even less now. 

Sarah.
[1] i think that's how much it was. This was some time ago....
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