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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."
Now I can use WINE on my Xbox....
Karma: Non-Heinous
Xbox is either a trademark or a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Mandrake might be some kind of trademark of MandrakeSoft. Linux definitely is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. GNU is cool, but I don't think it's a trademark.
If M$ was so determined to build a console and prevent people from running *nix and other fun stuff on it, *why* did they choose a (nearly) standard PC hardware platform. Please provide a more custom solution next time to give the hackers a real challenge ;-)
The first one to get CP/M running on the XBox will gain true kudos.
10 PRINT "Microsoft really wouldnt like this"
20 GO TO 10
RUN
Even if its nice and fun that they have made it possible why would i want to run linux on X-box? All they really do is helping MS finetuning their DRM system before it gets to he PC. It will be a cold day in hell before i buy an Xbox.
HTTP/1.1 400
Considering the lack of great games, the linux distro on the xbox will help cut the loses for those people that purchased it thinking there would be this great exodus from the PS2 to the xbox by the great game makers.
>>>please remove "nospam" from email address
...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.
They lose even more money every time an X-Box sits on a warehouse shelf instead of being sold.
Buying an X-Box does not "stick it" to Microsoft.
In my neck of the woods it's called the Halo Player.
Others simply call it an 'X' - box.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Microsoft sell XBoxes at a loss (and take subsidies off games), same as other consoles. Buying an XBox and no games immediatly causes Microsft a loss. However they can use those figures to get more games to the platform, and more sales, and more money. In the short term Microsoft lose out. In the longer term they regain their losses. In the longest term, well, who knows.
Why not? Buy ten of them, then smash them to bits. Every one you buy takes money directly out of Bill-n-Steve's pockets and away from their DRM project. Just don't buy any games
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Is anyone working on bringing Xbox emulation to the PC? Wouldn't that make more sense?
However they can use those figures to get more games to the platform, and more sales, and more money.
Hmm, I think that games makers will base their platform decision on how many games they sell on each platform, rather than how many of the platform there are out there.
Initially there will have been a "me too!" attitude to Xbox game development, but down the road they'll now be saying "sold 40,000 on PS2, sold 5,000 on Xbox. Let's stop Xbox development/cut the team/whatever".
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
"Why choose a (nearly) standard PC platform"?
Microsoft are long-distance players.
They are designing a Microsoft PC platform.
Let's call it 'Fritz 1'.
They would really like this to become the next standard.
And by trying this out in the XBox arena they are proofing the concept.
Whatever weaknesses get thrown up now will be closed in the next release.
After three releases, the design will be unbreakable.
After that, it's a minor matter to convince Dell and HP to base their PCs on this design.
And Windows XP 2003 will not run on anything else.
If the XBox does not scare you, perhaps you should consider a future where all PCs are designed by Redmond.
It would be smarter for people to leave the XBox alone and not contribute to M$'s strategy by hacking it.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
What would happen if someone was to approach MS as a game developer and officaly port this so its got all the real stuff and so MS can sell it at K-mart or wherever. I know its wrong on so many levels but it would get around the mod chip issue and be legal (assuming the licenses allow it)
Running Linux on the XBox helps no-one except Microsoft.
Microsoft are counting on this kind of project to test the XBox security.
And when all the weaknesses have been fixed we will find ourselves with a new closed PC platform.
Leave this thing alone, boycott it, let it rot.
It is an empty victory to help M$ improve this product.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
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
No, because if they remain unsold, MS will simply reduce production levels. If they are all bought, and people keep on buyingthe consoles but not the games, production goes up, profit goes down.
Games Workshop Petition
Oh, please stop that farse already.
The box may be sold at a loss, or not.
But every box sold means numbers to show to the game publisher's marketdroids.
Inflated numbers mean a greater probability of asking money for games that will run in the hardware.
The presumed loss not only is recuped from actual royalties, but too from sending the bill to the game publisher for signing a licensing contract.
For the *Morality* aspect of the question there is only a way out: you don't like them, in this case there is not a quick exit like saying "I have not alternative" because this is a luxury, not a need; if you dislike the company boycott them lawfully and stay aside from their products. Anything else is hypocrisy.
So, if I do get an xbox, I can have Bill Gates sponsor my hardware, and I will have a GNU-based development platform for making video-games? I realize they won't be speedy yet, nor run on non-chipped xboxes, but I will be able to use it for games development, right?
Stop the brainwash
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.
Once M$ really gets going on squashing this, that's it.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Exactly.
Judging by the cost of the X-Box and the cost of these off-the-shelf parts when purchased in bulk, why must anyone assume that they are losing anything? Many of the parts are quite OLD. That includes the hard drive, RAM, CPU, and now even the GPU. It is foolish for anyone to assume that they are losing any money at all. Microsoft gets these parts at dirt-cheap prices, and they have Flextronics build the devices in their slave-labor shops in Mexico.
Taking a loss... Sure.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, 64M, a 733MHz PIII, some slightly outdated nVidia chip, and an 8G hard disk. Real "powerful". See that baby "fly". For the same price, you can get a real PC.
How many times do we have to hear that the Xbox runs linux? It ran the linux kernel - L-i-n-u-x. Of *course* is going to run EVERY gosh darn *linux* distribution! Are we going to list ALL the distributions, ONE by ONE? Do we even KNOW them ALL?
You know how all those Linux geeks won't buy windows? Well, I've got this plan that will make them give you $300 apiece. Convince them... No! Dare them that they can't put their precious little operating system on an X-Box. They'll rush out like lemmings to buy X-Boxes to prove you wrong. You'll make a fortune!
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I agree, I wouldn't buy one either. But think about this: before Linux (I'll assume GNU/Linux, since it is now a distro) was ported to the Xbox, there was no reason to have a mod chip other than to play pirated games. Now people are hacking it (in the truest sense of the word) and are finding other fun uses for THE HARDWARE THAT THEY BOUGHT. I emphasize that because Microsoft just shut down a company that sold mod chips. They have no right to do this. Once you buy hardware, you own it. Now they might be able to convince a judge that the only reason to have a mod chip is to play pirated games, therefore robbing Microsoft of their money. But with the porting of Linux, it proves that there are non-illegal reasons to want to buy a mod chip.
Not that I think that it will stop Microsoft from bullying people, but it is a start. If you couldn't run the Linux kernel on the Xbox, there would be no other reason to buy a mod chip.
Besides, I think it is cool that people have the skills to do this kind of thing. It is interesting, and proves the power of the "little guy".
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Isn't is pretty obvious that the cost is a factor here? I'm in Canada and an X-Box goes for about three hundred bucks - which is a pretty damned cheap machine that I can throw Linux on. Even if I wanted a seperate machine to run Gnutella on, this is a low-cost way to do that.
The real reason why Microsoft is so dead set against the mod chips for the X-Box.
To keep people like us from installing Linux on the damn things.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
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."
VIA C3 800 MHz processor
133 MHz frontside bus
128 MB SDRAM, expandable to 1 GB
133 MHz memory speed
10 GB Ultra-ATA 100 hard drive, 5400 rpm
52x CD-ROM drive
Integrated Trident Blade 3D/Pro Media AGP 4x graphics Up to 8 MB shared video memory
Integrated AC '97 Audio with 3D enhanced sound
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet connection
Micro ATX tower case (14"D x 7"W x 14"H)
Available drive bays: one 5.25-inch external, one 3.5-inch external, one 3.5-inch internal
2 PCI slots
1 ISA slot
High-speed serial port
Parallel port
2 front and 2 rear USB ports
Game port
104-key keyboard
2-button mouse with wheel
Audio port (line-in, line-out, mic-in)
Stereo speakers
t _id=1957333&cat=41937&type=19&dept=394 4
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?produc
Carthago delenda est!
Look at the number of ways people have found to crack into software.
It is safe to predict that no software protection will ever work.
But hardware protection is already very hard to break.
And it is possible to make it unbreakable.
And IMHO truly we are not far from that point.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Yeah, just like the judge decided that since DeCSS was necessary to play DVDs on Linux, it's OK to distribute it.
Oh, wait...
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I'm not trying to say that a $199 Walmart Linux PC is an XBox, that's not my point. I was responding to the earlier author who maintained that
and, except for the (admittedly) crappy Trident shared-memory video card, I'll stand by that assessment. More memory, more hard drive space, higher CPU core frequency (and for that matter, higher FSB speed - 133 MHz) and Linux (Lindows OS) is already installed. Same price. Expandable.
For the people who suggest that an XBox would make a kewl inexpensive "server", I simply maintain that you could buy and support Microsoft's product, pay extra to hack it with a mod chip and install a free OS over the one you paid for when you bought the XBox, or you could simply buy and support a Linux PC.
"All this said," hacking an XBox is a pretty neat technical hack, but a lot of effort if all you're trying to do is to save a few bucks on hardware.
Carthago delenda est!
So Mandrake is on the XBox? Big deal.
Just last night I picked up 50 magic coins and was able to hack into the Pentagon using Super Mario Sunshine.
There's also the small matter that video memory and main memory are the same thing--seems like that would be a significant difference from the PC.
Who says that MS will support it forever? They. Won't. So eventually you will have an unsupported OS. Maybe you don't care - but who says some coder won't release a virus that exploits some newly discovered hole in win2K - and MS doesn't patch the hole - win2K is no longer "supported." You Are Screwed.
Forced upgrades? What forced upgrades?
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
I have taken a couple of CSE assembly courses. The answer, as best I know is that this is Possible -- but like climbing Everest is possible, too, it really isn't practical to do every time you want to convert a game. Unless someone's written a bit-by-bit translator, which is possible - you'll probably have to do it by hand. Line by line conversions of binary or assembly. Yuck.
But then again, I don't know quite how emulators work - by translating code line by line or just "faking" a total system to the code they emulate for. Does anybody have experience in emulation?
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
But if they lose $XYZ for every system sold - how much do they lose for each system built? Don't they re-imburse the seller before the system is sold? So by the time it hits the shelf, hasn't MS already spent that $20-40? So by not buying, you don't send money back up the pipe - the seller and the manufacturer and MS never see a dime from that XBOX.
It's just an idea - but doesn't that make more sense?
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Each xbox going to someone for the sole purpose of running linux hurts MS because it removes one more xbox from the pool of contributing to their recurring revenue stream, selling games. Each xbox diverted from its true purpose is a good thing(tm).
The probability of convincing enough people not to buy xbox to make a difference is very small.
There is a very good probability that a significant number of xbox could be diverted from their recurring revenue with a solid linux port.
Which character is going to popup when I need help writing a letter in OpenOffice -- Clippy or Tux? Maybe I should play that Clippy vs Tux Xbox game to see who's worthy of being my document writing assistant. ;)
grep >= ! == $your
Don't bother. They've got it in there heads that they are sticking it to The Man and they won't ever let go, no matter how much logic you use.
But let's say that they are right, that MS is losing, say, $40.00 (US) per XBox. After a million units sold they "lose" $40,000,000.00. So what? That's less than lunch money as far as MS is concerned. When these economic terrorsists start costing MS billions of dollars, then it might be work noticing. Sticking it to MS by buying an XBox is like killing a blue whale with a Nerf bat.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
MS Would never do a Linux distro for XBox, nor allow one to be done by a developer. The GNU Public License would screw MS over due to the need to disclose the source code, including the source code for the authentication system.
A BSD distro would be feasable, but VERY unlikely.
The XBox is a game platform. That's all MS wants it to be and they will not do anything to change that.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Protecting the XBox is good practice for building an 'unbreakable' home PC.
MS had to build a PC becasue they need to have a reference point. A software DRM solution would be problematic because of the wide range of hardware it was likely to end up running on. They have a need to get this reference system into the wild and see how people would attempt to break into it. Already they have reaped dividends by having their first attempt cracked.
They can do this without any great risk to their reputation as secure system builders because, after all, it's *only* a games console.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Lets see you run Halo, Project Gotham, Jet Grind Radio, Sega GT 2002, NBA2k3, NFL2k3 or ANY game that the xbox breezes through on that system.
NO matter what, were not comparing apples to apples here. That PC above doesn't play DVD's, it doesn't have Dolby Digital Sound, it doesn't have a swank video card.
Tell me where i can get a pc, the size of the xbox with DVD playback, that can play games, rip mp3's, have ethernet built in and plug into a tv.
(See my response to the guy above.)
Regardless, let's see you run ANY of those games under Linux, even on XBox, and I'll be interested.
If you're that excited about playing proprietary games (e.g. "Halo, Project Gotham, Jet Grind Radio, Sega GT 2002, NBA2k3, NFL2k3") on proprietary hardware, then for bog's sake, please buy an XBox (or a PS2, or a GameCube, or whatever).
Yes, an XBox can be made to emulate an off-the-shelf PC, and can be made to run Linux if you:
Meaning, of course, that your $199 XBox is now at least (I'm just thinking of the mod chip - I'm assuming that your labor is worthless) a $260+ Linux PC without a warranty. You can do that, and it's legitimately a pretty cool hack (tm) and a nice way to thumb your nose at Redmond, but if what you want is an inexpensive Linux PC, then why not simply buy the inexpensive Linux PC?
*sigh*
Carthago delenda est!
This makes things like Attack of the haX0r1ng Dreamcasts much more nasty. The "exploit physical security/drop dreamcast on open internal network/enumerate network from the inside" stuff was big at DefCon X this year, proving that its isn't all about wireless hacking now. An X-Box + Mandrake ups the ante for IT network admins.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
No one knows how many are chipped when you are looking at 5% of the market, however if 50% of the market are chipped (which would be known and seen from lack of sales of games vs. sales of consoles, and general hearsay), publishers will notice.