AfterDawn: Tech news

Linux Mandrake 9.0 for Xbox is available for download

Written by Lasse Penttinen @ 08 Oct 2002 7:54 User comments (8)

Exciting news, since this new distribution should give you a hassle-free installation. MOD your Xbox, stuff in a CD and you should have yourself a working Linux workstation.
EUROPE -- October 07 2002 -- Today the Xbox Linux Project (http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/) 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 corresponds to a standard installation of the (free) 3 CD version of the well-known Mandrake Linux distribution (http://www.mandrake.com/), which has only been released a week ago, so it contains the graphical environments Gnome and KDE, as well as software packages such as OpenOffice.org, XMMS and Mozilla. Since Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 is 100% compatible with Mandrake Linux 9, all additional packages from the official Mandrake Linux 9 installation CDs or the Mandrake website can be installed into Xbox Mandrake Linux.



To be able to use Xbox Linux Mandrake 9, you need a "modded" Xbox and a USB keyboard and mouse connected to the Xbox by a Xbox-USB adaptor, which can be easily built by most users.

With Xbox Linux Mandrake, the Xbox gaming console is just as powerful as any comparable PC with Mandrake Linux 9. It can be used for office applications, the internet, e-mail, Linux games, or even as a web, file or database server.

Mandrake Linux was chosen as the base for our distribution for various mostly technical reasons. We have no affiliation with MandrakeSoft, the creators of Mandrake Linux.

This is an important milestone for the Xbox Linux Project, which aims to provide an easy to use and highly compatible Linux distribution for the Xbox gaming console, to give Xbox users the freedom to do anything with the console they have paid for, instead of being restricted to gaming.


The Xbox Linux Project

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8 user comments

19.10.2002 02:20

I wonder if it will be more stable on the XBox than my system. It doesn't like my Samsung 8x8x32 writer and if a pop any CD into it and try accessing it, the OS will totally crash 20 seconds later! This happens in the GUI and in the console mode (ALT-CTRL-F1). :( This doesn't happen with any Redhat, Windows or Lycoris version.

29.10.2002 03:15

To say the truth, I never liked Mandrake too much. I tried lots of Linux distributions until I discovered Debian, the most stable and safest bet if you want to run Linux in your PC by far. On the other hand, it may require a long time to get up-to-date versions of the packages, and is not as "user-friendly" as Mandrake... Anyway, Sean, if your hardware was the same under both Red Hat and Mandrake, then the problem relies on your RPMs and/or kernel versions. You can try upgrading them and see what happens. Linux rules.

39.10.2002 03:29

I reported the problem to Mandrake. When ever I install Linux, I always start with a clean partition. Mandrake 8.1 never gave problems with accessing CDs in the Samsung. Mandrake 9 beta and RC2 only hung if I stuck a Video CD or UDF CD-RW (packet written) in the drive, but once I installed the final version, it crashes no matter what CD I stick in!

49.10.2002 03:42

Well, Mandrake has evolved, then. At least it won't discriminate any CD, whatever its color, sex, religion or format. A similar problem happened to a friend of mine. He had no patience. Just reformatted and migrated to Debian. Maybe you should upgrade and recompile your kernel before. Is it a SCSI drive we're talking about? If not, try turning on and off SCSI emulation.

510.10.2002 09:36

just out of curiosity, can you still play your Xbox games after installing linux? how about if you wanted to go back to the original Xbox O/S ?? would you have to make a ghost image or something prior to altering it? I can't imagine calling Micro$oft for tech support on an Xbox in order to restore it to working condition.. just seems like a helluva lot to go through to have a working linux system considering that you don't need to spend much to buy an old used P2 machine, which would run Linux just fine! and in which case, I would never install any flavor of linux besides Red Hat, I have tried Mandrake, Slackware, & Red Hat, and for the past few years that I have actually played with them, Red Hat blows the competition away every time. Anyhow, that's my 2 cents...

611.10.2002 01:22

If I had an Xbox, I'd wait for Redhat to be ported to it. I'm giving up on Mandrake and going to download the 5 CDs of Redhat 8.0 this weekend. I got a 56k modem and 2Mbps Europeonline.net filefetch by satellite DVB card. When downloading the Mandrake ISOs, it took 1 hour for two 700MB ISOs (after waiting in the queue), both downloading at 2Mbps each (500k/sec total).

720.8.2003 11:07

this site is dumb I wanted to download linux 9.0 because it said I could but it dosent tell you how to is is not a good site there is no help

820.8.2003 13:31
Prisoner
Inactive

If you want Red Hat, best site to get the latest updates and download the verisons is ftp://ftp.nrc.ca/pub/systems/linux/redhat/ftp.redhat.com/linux/ Here and back up some levels you can find linux for anything.

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