Slashdot Mirror


Xbox Runs Its First Legal Homebrew App

PineGreen writes: "As Michael Steil, the Xbox Linux project leader says:'On the Xbox Linux website, you can download "linuxpreview," an application that runs on modded Xboxes and is completeley legal, because the XDK was not used for development, and it does not contain any Microsoft code.'. See the X-box logo and Tux on the same screen. More information here."

13 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. Hey, Linux running on x86? by ObviousGuy · · Score: 2, Funny

    What a colossal waste of time.

    Think how many Linux drivers could have been written for as of yet unsupported hardware for all that effort.

    --
    I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.
    1. Re:Hey, Linux running on x86? by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 4, Funny
      What a colossal waste of time.
      It's not if it annoys the beejeesus out of Microsoft...
    2. Re:Hey, Linux running on x86? by pigeonhed · · Score: 3, Funny

      You right a colossal waste of time. Perhaps if we organized into a huge corporation and had someone with a huge ego running things we could slowly take over market share and then crush all who oppose us. Then we could slowly destroy all innovation and force our corporate viewpoint upon all others. opps yeah it has already been done.

  2. Linux Set Radio: Future by grungebox · · Score: 5, Funny

    Think of all the gaming possibilities now available to X-Box developers! 'Shell Scripting Xtreme!' or 'Marvel vs. Capcom vs. Vi vs. emacs!' I hear in the next Halo your standard gun fires tarballs and RPM's.

  3. X-box Linux app by inode_buddha · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hah! I hope these guys just happen to have tickets to the LinuxWorld Expo. That wouls be a great place for a demo....

    --
    C|N>K
  4. Re:$200,000 Award??? by donnacha · · Score: 2, Funny

    really? i would have thought being puerile would have been the bigger strain.
    Well, both are taxing. But I keep soldiering on.
  5. Re:Completely legal? by Sloppy · · Score: 2, Funny
    Then I can't wait to see what they come up with.

    "Your honor, today we are going to show that the defendent's activity of running third-party software on our XBox, is clearly a violation of the Endangered Species Act as well as Bigamy laws in most states."

    --
    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  6. Waste of time? I think not by Joey7F · · Score: 3, Funny

    Some people have jokingly said That it is not a waste of time as long as we are annoying M$.

    It is more than that! As with every product for consumers the way people hear about them is through advertising...pure and simple.

    So every time Microsoft says they don't want linux being run on their hardware, it not only "bugs" M$ but it also gives Linux free publicity. Hell, if I were IBM, Red Hat et al. I would being running linux on anything and everything Microsoft just for the propaganada value alone!

    No such thing as bad press, and this only makes Microsoft seem like a corrupt organization bent on making computing their way or the highway. Let 'em, to paraphrase Leia "The more they tighten their grip the more [operating] systems will slip through their grasp"

    --Joey

  7. Re:nope - read the box by antirename · · Score: 2, Funny

    Forbids my ass. That EULA doesn't mean anything more than the box it's printed on. Next they'll be saying "it is illegal to put a Tux sticker on an xbox" or "it is illegal to use this case as a flowerpot". Its HARDWARE. Let them try this one in court.

  8. Real games by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Funny

    Who cares about Halo - what I want to play is XBill on an XBox. Now that would be hilarious, especially if you were to demonstrate one at LinuxWorld :)

  9. Re:Legal HomeBrew Application ?? by Prior+Restraint · · Score: 3, Funny
    echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D7272 C3AF4F2snlbxq'|dc

    So what does this do, exactly? (no, I'm not stupid enough to just simply run it)

    I am! It prints out an email address on my machine (omitted for the sake of avoiding harvesters).

    Besides, what exactly is it that you're worried about? It's an echo piped to a calculator. About the worst that could happen is it prints something obscene.

  10. Re:Not necessarily by Citizen+of+Earth · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's not a matter of burners not being able to make copies of the data (they can make them perfectly fine, as evedenced by the fact that backups work on a modded console), but that the discs have something special that the console checks for, probably outside of the data range.

    So you just need to make your Commodore-64 disk nibbler scan all the way out to track 40.

  11. brave man by karlm · · Score: 4, Funny
    A funny story: the another roomate in the same place was into ISOs on IRC. Someone in the channel had a rare Japanese market game ISO. My roomate asked the guy what he wanted. The roomate then copied his windows swap file to whatever.iso (where whatever was the name of the game the guy wanted). They then swapped "ISOs". A day later our firewall was DOSsed. We figure the guy didn't take too kindly to the trade :)

    His swap file? Did he grep his swap file to make sure IE didn't swap out his credit card number recently? His home address? Passwords? Site membership username/password pairs? Network crypto credentials? His home machine LanMan and md4 password hashes?

    Your friend is a bit too brave and/or not quite smart enough. There's a reason you can encrypt your swap in *BSD and Linux.

    He should have half expected to wake up the next morning to a cubic yard of elephant dung and a baker's dozen of giant monogrammed pokemon vibrators charged to his credit card and shipped overnight to his mailing address from central Mongolia. He would have deserved it, I might add. He could have at least tried to get the file on an IOU basis. It's not like the other guy's bandwidth cost him more than his time. If I were the other guy, I'd take the oportunity to make a friend. No skin off my back and a quite useful philosophy. Of course, if your friend enjoys Mongolian elephant dung, giant vibrators, and DOS attacks, who am I to judge?

    --
    Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.