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Linux Running on Xbox Without Modchip!
NiteStar writes "It looks like people on xbox-scene.com and xboxhacker.net managed to run Xbox-Linux on a non-modded Xbox console.
It requires no soldering at all - you don't even have to open up the Xbox. They are using an exploit in the saved game handling of the EA xbox game '007 Agent Under Fire'.
It requires the original version of the 007 game and a memorycard you can connect to PC like the mega-X-key or datel's action replay. Apparently you can even build this memorycard yourself using a standard USB memstick." Frankly it seems like just soldering in the modchip would be easy, but big points for being clever!
No not really, all this means is that Linux gets a cheap, subsidised my MS platform to run on.
Should see the game being pulled out of the market soon, making XBox hacking illegal again
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Its a real victory for everyone who feels that when you pay for something you own it, it doesn't own you.
It's not a war. This project is just a good show of hacking spirit. Remember that this is how Linux got started in the first place.
The analogy I heard was that of being invited to a free dinner at someone's house and ending up demanding to supervise the cooking.
1. Linux needs to be ubiquitous. Non-PC is not yet dominated by Windows, so if Linux gets established there, it could gradually take over the rest of the market. 2. MS loses money with each Xbox. If you could run Linux on a cheap, subsidized machine and create a Beowulf cluster (!) or something, then you're using your enemy to prosper -> good. 3. It's a hack. This is how Linux was created!
When the Xbox is yesterday's game console and you can pick it up at the pawn shop for $50, you'll be happy that it can run linux unmodded.
Now, the real test here would be benchmarking UT or Quake on the Xbox against the Walmart Microtel PC. Everyone's whining about how stupid this is, that you can buy a PC for the price of an Xbox, etc, let's see some numbers. The Microtel stuff isn't designed for gaming, the Xbox is. If I can haul ass on UT on the Xbox, it was worth it.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
You are thinking like a buisness. Linux is not one buisness they are a comunity so there will be a very wide range of focuses for using Linux. And as with this comunity not everybody agrees that Linux needs to be on the desktop. I personally beleave the quest for the desktop is basicly a useless endever because in my mind the desktop is a dieing computer platform. And it is moving more towards Imbedded devices that have special tasks (Like the XBox, Playstation, PDAs, Server Apliances). This is an important task just as important as Linux on the Desktop. By making Linux kernel as much of a general porpose tools as possible helps it gain grounds on many new technoligies. Things like this is the reason why Linux is more popular then *BSD.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Timing seems right for an April Fools joke...
Lol... That forum is a good read...
About 50 posts of "He's full of crap, there's no way he could make that work, there are dozens of people working on this smarter than he is".
Followed by "Holy crap, it DOES work".
Oddly enough, few of the original posters put up retractions or apoligies for their initial flaming.
Figures... Everyone is "uber-l33t" and quick to jump on a new poster, but few are man enough to stand up and offer apologies when they're forced to eat their words.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Only if someone provides a "tool" for circumventing a copy protection device. In this case, no tool is being distributed (written instructions are NOT a tool, unless executable by a machine.) It is not prohibited to ACTUALLY circumvent copy protection devices (of course, unlicensed copying of copyrighted material is), just to provide the tools. I don't see the DMCA applying here, at all. Furthermore, an X-Box is largely like a Ramones CD; I can hit it with a hammer, let my neighbor borrow it, sell it on EBay, rip tracks (or chips) out of it (for my own use); Its only when I copy the music/software out of it and the distribute it that anybody has issues with it. And that's regular copyright law, not the DMCA.
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
I'll work on whatever I bloody well want to, and so will everyone else.
On one unit, yes. But, the more they sell, the more they lose... And lets face it, I can buy a low end P2 for $200, the XBox can do a bit more then that... Plus it can play DVDs for another $30. So yeah, I'll spend $230 on a DVD player that doubles as a computer just to get $200 out of Microsoft's pockets.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
Any need to read further than the subject line, and I wonder just what you're doing here in the first place.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Because it has TV/video out that works, stero sound that works, it looks good next to a TV, and it is cheap. Sure I could build a computer with most of that, but cheap is already out, a nice looking case would just about be more than an Xbox. Now find a TV card that works on linux. (Doable, but not all work so be careful) Of course the computer I build would be faster, but that wasn't a requirement.
A xbox is a good machine for those expirimenting with linux as a control for their home enertainment system. It isn't good for general purpose computing, but it is good for living room applications. Drop MAME, stella, atari800, etc on it and you can play a lot more games. With a good net connection you can download movies from the internet and play them on a TV, which is bitter than the monitor most people have. (I don't know where to find legal movies, but that is a different issue. I'm sure you can find one though, which will prove to the judge that copyright infringement isn't the only reason for this)
I haven't followed the X-Box hacking projects out there, but if this is the first person to try a buffer-overflow on an existing certified game then I'll bet we're onto something here. With the plethora of games coming out that are coded under tight deadlines I'd imagine there's going to be a rather large number of buffer overflows found in stuff like this. The reading of a saved-game from the memory chip is a great one. I'd imagine you could do something similiar when games need to pull data from the hard drive too. On top of that, with things going online there's a high probability (in my mind) that buffer overflows will exist within the networking code.
Now, there are two ways MS can entirely prevent this. One is to re-structure the X-box OS so that buffer overflows just cannot occur. There are theoritical techniques for this if I'm not mistaken; but nobody's got a horribly good reason to do this. MS does now I guess.
Or, MS could do a security audit on all the code for a game before it comes out and verify that it's free of buffer overflows. Baahahaha!
Mozilla is unusual amongst X applications in that it handles virtually everything itself. This is why you sometimes get wierd behaviour with the mouse moving by itself or your keyboard map changing when you're using it. Early versions didn't even support USB mice! (I still have an old 386 with a kensington bus mouse that Mozilla doesn't support.) Basicly Mozilla is a platform rather than a webbrowser, it happens to have a web browser with it. The Mozilla platform not only has hardware independence but also does cool things such as draw its own buttons using a customized widget library, parse XML itself rather than use third party XML tools, draw JPEGs and GIFs, layout HTML, and manage tabs; it includes multiple software platforms such as Javascript and i386 emulation, and it uses direct disk access (via /dev/sda or /dev/hda, etc) to handle the file system to implement resource forks and stuff.
That's why an out-of-the-box Mozilla install is about 25 megs, rather than the four or so you'd expect out of what's ultimately just a network enabled rich text viewer.
People are asking "Why Xbox Linux?" and others are responding with "Why not?", well I have a legitimate reason for wanting Linux on an unmodded Xbox.
My Xbox is going back to MS as they have attempted to fix a problem several times and have so far been unsuccessful. This time, they're considering swapping systems for a new one, which I'm fine with except for one thing: Loss of saved games.
They will not just swap drives as it would save them at least 5 minutes of work, so I will lose all of my info on the HD.
With Linux running on my unmodded Xbox, I could possibly FTP the data elsewhere and restore it on the new system. This makes so much sense to me that I wonder why there is no way of doing it by default.
Microsoft's idea is to purchase their Memory Units and backup this way. Problem is, since each Xbox comes with a hard drive, no developer tries to make the smallest possible size save file. I would need several MUs to backup my data. Plus, some files cannot even be copied to a MU which means they cannot be backed up at all.
Some form of backup should exist to relieve this problem. I think that this could be it.
The logic holds sound as long as they sell every XBox they make. If they sell an XBox and build another, then they've lost $200. If they manufacturer 10 more and sell 10 more they lost $2000. But, if they had one sit on the shelf and not sell, then they've only lost $400.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
It's not about finding an affordable PC to run Linux on, that's easy. It's about thumbing your nose at MS and Palladium, and doing what should not be possible.
You've missed the point of using a public-key signature checking algorithm. The Xbox doesn't have any secrets you can "tease out" by this or any other means - AIUI the key the Xbox uses to check signatures is already well known. You might as well do the signature checking on your own PC and do the timing analysis on that for all the good it'll do you.
Xenu loves you!