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Xbox Receives Linux Mandrake 9.0
An anonymous reader writes "Today the Xbox Linux Project announced that Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 has been released. This is the first complete Linux distribution for the Microsoft Xbox gaming console.
A 350 MB installation CD of Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 is available for download free of charge from the Xbox Linux website."
...it contains the graphical environments Gnome and KDE, as well as software packages such as OpenOffice.org, XMMS and Mozilla.
and all this in only 350 mb!! I wonder if I can download and install it on my pcPersonally I think that the fine fine hackers of the Xbox Linux project have done a great job. Part of their motivation is the $200,000 prize, another part of the motivation is that Micro$oft is losing a bundle on each Xbox sold for which no games are bought -- but -- IMHO the bigger parts of the motivation is the pure hacking challenge and the quest for freedom in using hardware you own.
I alwso want to t know if this is something more like the mini-distro that openbrick use. A mandrake mini-distro anad a FreeBSD mini distro.
g /download/freebsdb z2/view
check http://www.openbrick.org
http://www.openbrick.or
and http://www.openbrick.org/Members/jp/mini-mdk.tar.
The JZA
After considerable expense, and a gift of considerable legal resources and time by the law firm of Davis & Schroeder in Monterey, California in recovering the U.S. registered trademarks for Linux, Linus and his advisors concluded that the only way to protect the mark was to actively pursue the registration of it in a number of countries around the world and to maintain the U.S. mark in his name. To do so has required that we aggressively prosecute people who tried to register the name for their exclusive use in the U.S. and other countries, which we have successfully done in five countries. Should you become aware of other people claiming the exclusive use of the mark in other countries, please contact us at the address below.
So you could say it is a protected trademark in most countries. If someone else tries to trademark it, they will protect it aggressively.
Ah, after a bit of research in the FAQs, I've found the answer to my question:
Will I still be able to play games once Linux is on my hard disk?
That depends on the solution you choose. If you run Linux through the XBE bootloader on an Xbox with a modchip, there's a dual-boot solution.
There are also "Live CD's" that make it possible possible to run Linux from a CD without having your hard disk modified at all.
If you use the replacement ROM method, you would have to install both ROMs in parallel to be still able to run games.
How about shutting down Lik Sang for selling mod chips for the xboc
The problem with this is your assumption that as computer parts get older, they get cheaper. While this would likely be the case if companies like Intel continued to produce the same volume of their older chips while simultaneously producing newer and faster ones, this is not what happens in the industry.
As manufacturers introduce newer products, they steadily ramp down production on older models, for obvious reasons -- they have a limited production capacity, and there is no point in using most of it on obsolete products that are no longer in high demand. Thus, while the price on e.g. a Pentium 800 will decline as faster processors come out, it will never converge on $0. At some point the manufacturer will halt and even increase the cost of the part to compensate for the revenue they may have gained making a better/faster model.
Go visit www.pricewatch.com and look at the CPU prices. Sure, for the most part the Pentium IIIs cost less than the Pentium 4s, but not uniformly so (ignoring the Tualatin models which are a special case). Compare particularly the Pentium 4 1.5 GHz part with the Pentium III 850.
Same holds for hard drives. You're not going to find a new hard drive for under $50 regardless of whether or not models with 3x the capacity are available for $10 more.
And don't even start with RAM -- the prices there are quite volatile and as likely to increase as not, though certainly the long term trend is down. Older most definitely does not equal cheaper in this area, either.
So yes, it's true that Microsoft's costs have gone down, but I would argue that the decline in costs is not as significant as you seem to believe, and certainly far from being "dirt cheap."