Gentoo on the Xbox

cbreaker · Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2003 7:27 am Post subject:

Ohh, nice. I'll definately be replacing the debian install that's on there now with your gentoo release. I had downloaded an older one before but never got around to installing it.

Gentoo > all. So much easier to keep your system up to date. At the rate of which linux and the open source system that supports it progress, it's really very very important to have a system you can keep current.

I imagine that eventually things will slow down a bit and level off, making it easier to manage with a binary only system.. In the meantime, there's nothing like Gentoo Linux.

Thanks for bringing it to my Xbox =)

cbreaker · Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2003 3:54 am Post subject:

Okay I've got gentoo on my xbox, and there's plenty of issues.

I was hoping that it was going to be a lot better then before, but not much has changed.

When I boot, the console is messed up. The left hand side of the screen is dim and unreadable, the right side looks okay. X looks like garbage until xbvset does it's thing I guess.

I still can't overscan the screen. Well, I can, but then Xv takes a HUGE performance hit. Contrary to what obviously many people want, I *want* the screen to be overscanned - watching TV via mythtv on a screen that's got a black border around the edges bites.

Speaking of which, mythtv performance is lousy. For me anyways. Double buffering doesn't seem to work well with Xv, even when I'm not trying to use an overscan mode with xbvset. The frame rate seems to be halved and there's horizontal tearing in the image.

Maybe someone can give me some performance pointers here. Maybe someone knows how to overscan the screen without a huge performance hit? nvtv doesn't seem to agree with the new video drivers.

Ahh well. Until these issues are resolved, linux on the xbox is still very much a novelty.

nailed · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2003 Posts: 9

ShALLaX · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 34

If you had performance issues with Gentoox Home 2.1, try 3.0.. its much faster and uses the xbox fb.

cbreaker · Posted: Mon Nov 17, 2003 5:57 pm Post subject:

Sweet, I'll give it a try.

Although I've had issues with Linux on my xbox in the past, I very much appreciate the effort put into these kinds of things, and I thank you for it.

EdSchouten · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 79

Okay guys,

I wrote an ebuild called xbox-sources-2.4.25.

I've also tested it on my Xbox and compiled a kernel with it and it actually boots

I put it in Bugzilla:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44818

I hope that I can maintain it soon, so we could have some massive Xbox-Gentoo'ing

Snake007uk · Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2004 10:07 pm Post subject:

does kernel 2.6 work on xbox ?

also does anyone know if i can use freevo ontop of gentoo ??

i want a proper linux media OS so all i do is turn it on, and i get a menu asking me if i want to wat a DVD play DIVX,, xvid etc... or check out picturess and a option menu.

nothing else if i select DVD it starts up the DVD witht he menu as normal (like in a DVD player) if i select divx etc... it should ask which file on the DVD/cd i want to play and off it goes.. u get the picture ?? is there anything like this ??
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Snake007uk · Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2004 11:35 pm Post subject:

also a quick note,:

i dont see the need for home and pro considering as all the xboxes have the same hardware unless someopne wants to compile the whole system with dfferent use flags ??

or am i missiong something ??

Snake
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cbreaker · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 1:19 am Post subject:

Snake007uk · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 1:38 am Post subject:

link ?? also ae u using this ??

Snake
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LD · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 4:24 am Post subject:

Ok, here's what is probably a horrendously obvious question.

I don't own an X-Box, but if I did, and I wanted to do what you guys have... would I STILL be able to run X-Box games? If not... then why should I bother when I can just build a normal system for an upgrade.

cbreaker · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 6:04 am Post subject:

You need a mod chip, of course, whether you want to run Linux and/or if you want to use XBMP and/or put your xbox games on the hard drive.

But yes, you can run Linux on the Xbox, as well as still run your games. There's a few things to be aware of.

If you put in a mod chip, you won't be able to use Xbox Live unless you have some means of completely disabling it for when you want to do so. Even then, there's no guarentee that a Microsoft "patch" to Xbox live won't delete everything else on the hard disk.

That being said, xbox linux has the ability to create a hard disk file like UMSDOS could. It'll make a 2GB file or whatever, and use that as it's virtual hard disk. In this way, you could boot up the xbox into a dashboard such as Evox, select either games/emulators/whatever or Linux, and everything is good. However, using Linux in this way tends to be very picky to improper shutdowns.. if you crash or turn off the xbox without cleanly unmounting the virtual hard disk, there's a good chance you'll corrupt it and lose your linux data.

Then there's the option of letting linux completely control the hard drive, and use the "cromwell" bios replacement. This will not allow you to play games anymore but it will run Linux the best.

Some people have gotten creative. They have switches to be able to switch between two hard drives, and can enable and disable the mod chip. Some mod chips can contain more then one bios image and you can select which one you want to use.

So as you can see, there's a lot of ways to do it. On my Xbox, I have the xecuter2 bios on a matrix mod chip and I boot into evox. I can select linux or games or emulators or xbmp. Since I am not looking to really create YALB (Yet Another Linux Box) it works for me.

ps. Cromwell is legal. Running Linux on your xbox is legal.

Evox, xecuter, xbmp, etc, are in the grey area. They are compiled using the Xbox Development Kit without license, and some contain reverse-engineered microsoft code. They can be hard to find for downloads and much of the community for it sucks bad. Don't hold your breath trying to find help with this stuff on IRC and forums and such. However, there's some good howto web sites.

Good luck.

EdSchouten · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 79

EdSchouten · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 79

Guess what, I'm running Gentoo Hardened on the Xbox

EdSchouten · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 79

For whom it may concern:

http://www.g-rave.nl/projects/xbox-linux/hardened-gentoo.txt

EdSchouten · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 79

Hmmm... My /var/log/apache2 shows that everybody is looking at the URL and no reactions in this topic yet... :roll:

Come on guys, what do you think of it?

graz · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2003 Posts: 41 Location: NoWhere

the howto is good. When you release the new version? (now is unavailable)
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EdSchouten · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 79

graz · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2003 Posts: 41 Location: NoWhere

if you need help let me know

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scoobydu · Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 10:01 am Post subject:

EdSchouten · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 79

I've got a working config, but it is still buggy, because it ignores my boot options.

I tried to make a bootcd, but it didn't work out because of that bug (it mounted my /dev/hda1 instead of the rootfs on the cd)...

Sorry for the late response

Yours,

Ed Schouten

EdSchouten · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 79

scoobydu · Posted: Sat May 22, 2004 6:18 pm Post subject:

EdSchouten · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 79

Well, I guess there is no need for that howto of mine anymore, because Xbox is going official (if everything goes well). Look at this thread for more info:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/18320

Gimli, chrb and me were mailed if we'd like to do the Xbox part.

We're going to release bootcd's and kernel sources soon, so you guys can begin installing Gentoo on your Xboxen

scoobydu · Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 10:57 am Post subject:

That is indeed good news!

That means I can get rid of reiser! And put ext3 on instead.

So any timescales for releases? the reason I ask is that Ive already spent quite a bit of time trying to get 2.6.6 running on my xboxes but gentoox doesnt appear to work in exactly the same way as gentoo does on my amd64 server. So its time consuming!

Im very close to just doing a standard gentoo install for a PIII and applying the patches myself. I dont need X, or xpads etc, just usb devices but if you guys are going to do an initial release pretty quickly, then Ill hang on, and perhaps help test yours?

btw; the hardened howto would still be useful in the interim, could you email it to me?

scooby
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