XBox Chip With Legal BIOS

Lours writes "OzXChip, an Australian company, has a new Xbox chip which comes preinstalled with the new (Cromwell Linux BIOS. Previous chips came without (or simplistic) BIOS for obvious legal and hardware-related (HD-key) reasons you had to go through a lot of manipulations in order to install a patched version of the original Microsoft BIOS or ask the vendor to do it which obviously he was not willing to do for free (when he was willing to). Since the new Cromwell BIOS is fully open source it can be shipped with the chip without any legal risks, gaining you a lot of time, sweat and money. Plus the chip has a very useful feature: by using software based on Andy Green's -- one of the maintainers of the XBox Linux project -- Raincoat, it lets you flash a new BIOS very easily: burn the BIOS file onto a blank CD, put it in the Xbox, boot and you are done. With such beasts there is not much left in the way of want-to-be Linux Xbox hackers who might have been affraid until now to have to deal with delicate hardware intricacies or reluctant to run the whole town for a vendor willing to mod their Xbox at the smallest fee. With important linux distributions also incoming (Debian and Mandrake are underway if not completed) it won't be long before everyone can write code for (and on!) the machine only a few minutes after receiving the chip in his mailbox. Hopefully we are going to see a zillion things running on the machine that Microsoft would only have dreamt of making (and selling)." Update: 01/23 16:07 GMT by T : The company's name is actually OzXChip, rather than OzChip (as originally rendered); thanks to reader Michael Muir for pointing this out.

Comments

Re:Build it, the (apps) will come?

[b0r1s]

There's no good reason why a majority of the people would want this. There is a small minority who will do it just to show that it can be done, the rest either:

1. Will buy an X-Box to play games and DVDs ONLY
2. Will not buy an X-Box, but instead will buy a dedicated machine to do whatever you might want to hack into a linux-running X-Box

Why? Because as a computing platform, the X-Box isn't that impressive, especially for $200. The graphics are nice, indeed, but you can buy a P4 tower from Dell for $400 these days, or a Tivo/PVR for a few hundred, a DVD player for $99, you'd have to be really dedicated to mod a perfectly good X-Box (which voids the warranty).

Yea, it's a nice hack for those who really want to see linux running on everything. For everyone else, another dedicated box is a better option.

Re:Let me get this straight....

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true. An XBox sold is better than an XBox shelved.