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I just got a Soekris and it's a fine box but yesterday I realised that an Xbox is cheaper, more powerfull and it has a hard drive (but only one NIC). It's bigger and not as quiet as a Soekris but it's probably still better than a standard PC. I don't know about FreeBSD but it can run Linux without hardware modification.

I suppose, the same way Goldeneye started as a game and ended up as the boot disk for Xbox Linux...

Actually, it was Mechwarrior , though 007:Agent Under Fire can be used as well.

(an aside: anyone know if Robertson ever paid up on the whole "run linux on physically untouched xbox"?)

People have been mentioning the Xbox, whose BIOS requires signed code both for the dashboard (roughly the OS) and the game discs. So of course the Xbox-Linux Project developed their own Free BIOS, Cromwell (see the bottom of the page), which is more or less just a Linux loader with no Microsoft BIOS code in it. (Other BIOSes like EvolutionX are derivative works of the MS BIOS and thus technically illegal.)

So yeah, there are Free BIOSes, there is a MS BIOS that enforces a signed code restriction, and there has been a need to bypass that restriction.

Hm. Why don't they pick up an Xbox for $150, install Linux on it (use "hardware installation" so you're not tempted to game), and add a monitor for $100? Half the price, Linux, and a "cool factor".

Not being able to mod proprietary hardware designed for the sole purpose of playing proprietary games (and clearly advertised as such) is a world away from true risks to your freedom. Come back when you have a legitimate gripe (such as not being able to run home-built software on a PC).

It looks like has laid the legal groundwork for Trusted Computing. With the High Court upholding a law forbidding the user from disabling this sort of technology, it's much more significant than simply an unwise law being passed by the legislature.

This is essentially prior restraint. i.e., requiring permission before publishing something, as opposed to being punished for any violations of a law after publication. To give a concrete example of the effects this could have, take a look at Xbox Linux - Microsoft wants to hold the keys of who can run what on the Xbox, and are pushing for the same on the PC.

You can read details at http://www.xbox-linux.org/docs/xboxpc.html which points out that Microsoft is planning to turn the Xbox into more of a PC. For instance, they are considering adding MSIE and WMP to the current version, which would mean it's not for the "sole purpose of playing proprietary games". Yet modchips for it would presumably still be illegal under this ruling.

Luckily, there are flaws in the Xbox protection which allow Linux to be run without a modchip. The method which allows you to add an extra hard disk, however, requires a modchip. Since these modchips have been declared illegal, there would also seem to be a distinct possibility of the software method also being upheld as illegal. After all, it's bypassing the same mechanism, just in a different way.

The argument that this is irrelevant because the device is sold as a proprietary device to run proprietary programs could also be applied to a PC sold as a "Windows PC". Sure, the owner of a Windows PC shouldn't expect to be able to make courtroom demands of the hardware vendor that Linux can (easily) be run on it. But, making him subject to criminal prosecution for doing so is quite a departure from that.

As it stands, Microsoft could withdraw permission to ship Windows on ordinary PC's, and use their desktop monopoly to divert everyone to XBox or similarly equipped hardware which doesn't allow free (er... unTrusted) operating systems to run. I think it may have been a good idea to nip this in the bud rather than having the legality your OS and software choices subject to the whim of a software vendor and a judge.

Wow. You just ruled Linux illegal.

I guess I don't understand how breaking the DRM cost any royalties at all. From my understanding, it allows people to run Linux on the XBox, but if you buy an XBox, you have already paid for the XBox OS. You're not taking anything away from MS, because you paid their royalties when you bought the XBox.

Well, (a) there's the obvious -- people dump Linux on the XBox, Microsoft depends (like many console makers) on royalties to subsidize the sales of each XBox and sells them at a loss. However, I was thinking of (b) the fact that MR's funding to get Linux on the X-Box also neatly allowed piracy of XBox games. For the $200,000 MR put up, he probably made his money back many times over in going after Microsoft.

He may be selling cheap PCs with Lindows/spire on them, but I've never actually heard of anyone buying one.

He cut a deal with Wal-Mart to have them sell PCs preloaded with Lindows. He also had some sort of commercial application sales thing where you could buy new applications just by clicking a button on your desktop or something. I didn't play around with it.

and from what I recall, the "Linux on XBox" contest stopped short of being able to hack the XBox without using additional hardware.

Nope (see 007/Mech Assault method) -- as a matter of fact, MR's second prize was specifically for whoever managed to get things running without hardware modifications. It was eventually done by taking advantage of non-robust handling of save game data.

Oh, and in his latest suit, MR managed to legally weaken the trademark of Microsoft's core product *and* grab $20 million for Linux development.

He's not the sort of person that you'd want to have working against you.

NB: Off-topic (X-Box Linux)

I run a vanilla Gentoo install on my X-Box - please note this is not the GentooX distribution, which although I consider a good idea in principle, as I do the Xebian project, both seem to have their peculiarities, and are definitely not standard post-install Debian/Gentoo environments.

However, it is perfectly possible to install Gentoo on an X-Box using merely the 'Emergency Linux' provided with the MechAssault hack save games, available from the the Xbox-Linux website. All a genuine Gentoo install requires, basically, is a means of chrooting into the filesystem on which you are going to install, then wget and bz2 tools in order to download and decompress a bootstrap environment - or a Gentoo CD with precompiled packages.

NB: Off-topic (X-Box Linux)

I run a vanilla Gentoo install on my X-Box - please note this is not the GentooX distribution, which although I consider a good idea in principle, as I do the Xebian project, both seem to have their peculiarities, and are definitely not standard post-install Debian/Gentoo environments.

However, it is perfectly possible to install Gentoo on an X-Box using merely the 'Emergency Linux' provided with the MechAssault hack save games, available from the the Xbox-Linux website. All a genuine Gentoo install requires, basically, is a means of chrooting into the filesystem on which you are going to install, then wget and bz2 tools in order to download and decompress a bootstrap environment - or a Gentoo CD with precompiled packages.

Well not really an 'application', but it should be linux when it comes to the *real* consoles

XBox-Linux
PlayStation2-Linux

Which console do you want to use today?

bummer.

yeah but if you run this you have to remove your xbox linux cause XBox live and xbox linux are incompatty.

Well seeing as you can already run a full Linux distro on the XBox, i assume FF will run...

Microsoft is already doing it with the XBox.

Hidden 512 byte initial startup ROM in MCPX
Microsoft hide startup code in the MCPX which tries to see if the BIOS is approved by Microsoft before allowing it to run - MICROSOFT ONLY

Cryptographic signatures in the BIOS
Microsoft attempt to use very strong cryptography to only allow a BIOS approved by Microsoft to run - MICROSOFT ONLY

System Monitoring Device Crypto challenge
Unless the BIOS responds soon after startup with a cryptographic sequence to the SMC, it will be reset - MICROSOFT ONLY

RSA Encrypted hashes on Applications
Ridiculously strong crypto on the applications (2048 bit RSA, double the keylength many banks use) means that only Microsoft programs can be run - MICROSOFT ONLY

Yes. The X-Box is a standard PC with a Win2K based BIOS.

There's a link here that describes the soldering method in detail. No mod chip required, but it does take a good deal of effort. Basically you just flash the original X-Box BIOS, rather than circumventing it and running code on a modchip.

Despite the article's claims that this will not allow you to run games, I'm pertty certain that you could simply replace the original MS BIOS with a less-than-legal one that would play games...


--LordPixie

actually, with regard with buffer overruns, it has to do with the lack of index/range/etc. checking. They assumed that it wasn't necessary as they thought in an ideal world, it's not going to be an issue.

Also in a stand point of performance too as range checking does take some cycles.
Of course, instead of using the typical "if x is greater than this, then do this" and "if x is less than this, then do this", you can implement it using just one check with a mask. For example, if your range is 0-15 (aka a nibble or 4 bits), you can mask out (0xfff0 for 16bit numbers or 0xfffffff0 for 32bit and so on) then check if the result is not 0 (which is very fast on modern computers, even those for game consoles as MIPS has a register that's always zero ($zero). (typically, most game consoles use a version of MIPS with the exception of the xbox, which is ~x86).
And in some cases, you can do the checking out of the loop so it's only done once per whatever (as opposed to doing it many, many times per whatever).

Furthermore, a lot of buffer sizes are a power of 2 (or somewhere close to that; (2^x)-1, etc.) so implementing it isn't too hard.

Heck, in some cases, it can be implemented in hardware for security reasons. (of course, if that was the case with the xbox, then ppl wouldn't be able to use the 007 saved game exploit to run code to then reflash the xbox bios with a more linux friendly crom bios)

how many hours it will take for someone to figure out how to hack it to run Linux. It should be mostly the same as Xbox-Linux

But, I still would never pay 600 bucks for it when I can still get the Linare PC for 200 bucks and is comporable, if not better.

I'm still really new to linux, and can't wait to move to linux. But there are still a few things holding me back.

So to get my feet wet with Linux and also to have fun, I installed Ed's Xebian on my xbox. I can boot up the xbox and play all of my normal xbox games. Then if I want to watch a video, I just boot up linux (which is now in the main xbox menu), run mplayer, and off I go.

Although I have had problems playing back certain videos. If the screen get's really complex, like if it's raining, and the video was compressed using dvix, or xvid, it can get pretty chunky.

It's not really a problem, but it happens every once and a while.

The only thing I've lost with running linux on the xbox is that I can no longer use xbox live.

Other then that I love it.

-asoap

What is worrying is you can only succeed if you make you product unable to be used for anything else. So for games consoles you have to make it near impossible for anyone else to be able to write software (especially free software) for the device.

Is this like the Xbox? I'm sure these folks would disagree!

Enhydra, an Open Source Java-based Application Server, was recently installed on an XBox using Xebian.

I had submitted a story about this the day it happened (a few days ago) but for some reason it didn't make the cut. I guess underpowered web servers are sexier than underpowered application servers..(?)

Enhydra, an Open Source Java-based Application Server, was recently installed on an XBox using Xebian.

I had submitted a story about this the day it happened (a few days ago) but it didn't make the cut.

I just found this link myself. I have not tried it yet.

according to this you can run at 1024x768 at 80hz. That, coupled with a gf2+ and a p3, makes the xbox a nifty, pretty spunky computer for under 200 bucks.

it's to play games

This opening of the Xbox may eventually a fellow run independently developed game software on the Xbox hardware. ("Independently developed" means that Microsoft doesn't get a cut of the revenue. So much for razors and blades business model.) With a port of the GNU/Linux system to Xbox hardware, such games would potentially include the whole gnome-games suite, the freepuzzlearena suite, Tetanus On Drugs, Tux Racer, Quake III Arena, and every NES and Game Boy Advance game in existence.

Now why the FUCK would I want one of those? How come nobody says what the fucking thing does?

Read the grandparent:

Modified XBE's and custom code can boot (This is a HUGE feature - as you'll all see soon)

This is the milestone. An XBE is the Xbox equivalent of a Win32 EXE or a Linux ELF, that is, a program file. If you can boot a modified program file, then you can potentially make a file called "grub.xbe" that will load the kernel of a free GNU/Linux operating system. This is the approach that this team plans to take.

Imagine buying that nice chunk of Hardware for $199 and being able to actually do something useful with it ... and the best part is, that MS is losing money on every sale. And that project is actually underway.

That only leaves to figure out what to use it for. The thing has an ethernet port, the gameports can probably be used as USB-ports given the right adapters, and there's Video/Audio out ...

i heard something about someone putting linux on an xbox and running it on that. where can i find information?

I believe you are referring to www.xbox-linux.org. Looking at the website it looks like are making progress slowly though I don't think it will be easier than porting to the Dreamcast despite the x86 architecture. I believe part of the reason the Dreamcast port was successful was due to hardware documentation, namely the leaked SDK document.

With the X-Box it aint so easy because anyone who applies for the dev-kit has to sign a NDA. So the only way Linux on the X-Box is going to happen is to reverse engineer the system, just like the aforementioned group are doing. Microsoft are no doubt quite determined to stop unauthorised development for the X-Box.

xbox-linux.org
Alternate url (to the same site, though).

/Steel Lynx
--

That's not true... The XBox runs a stripped down version of Window 2000, as you can read at the Xbox-Linux site. These guys managed to get Apache running on that minimal W2k.