Hello I and several members of the xbox-scene community have expressed interest in a lighter distribution for the xbox. As you may know the xbox runs on a mobile celeron 733, makes use of an nforce1 chipset and 64mb of shared ram. it would take little work to port! The current linux distributions are very bulky. KDE does not run well haha, we need a nice distro that doesn't hog all of our precious 64mb!
Damn small linux would be an excelent xbox distribution and would require very little work to port. I am a novice when it comes to linux, I know people who have used it for years who still dont know much about it. I do not posess the skills or knowledge required to do the work that is needed. This would be excelent exposure for DSL....
if anybody is interested head on over to www.xbox-scene.com's forums under the linux section there is a thread waiting for you.There has already been much work done for the debian distribution over at xbox-linux.org and the cvs contains all the kernal patches and modified xf86 stuff so I beleive it would be simple for you guys to port dsl to the xbox.I guess on the face of it, it IS in keeping with the spirit of the distro..."no machine left behind"....
Previously, many DSL threads have discussed topics realted to what software to leave in, what to leave out based on the needs of folks with machines that were older and didn't have great amounts of resources. In my mind, this theme translated to providing a distro to people or groups who did not have the financial resources to necessarily buy the hardware that is being mass marketed at any given point in time (with a $500-$2,000 price tag) and had to rely on "hand me down" desktops and notebooks.
With some recent posts on slashdot about a goal of producing $100 PC's for low income governments, the XBox might actually fit into that category. You can pick up a used Xbox on eBay for $100 any day of the week, and a new one will put you back for only $50 more.
My only concern with DSL taking this direction would be longevity. M$ obviously isn't a supportor of Linux on their product and the XBox2 will probably debut sometime this year and will probably contain new methods to circumvent the community at large from porting Linux to it. So the number of machines a port could acutally be used on may be limited.
But...like the orginal poster said...it could be a great outlet for a great distro...just think of all the "obsolete" Xbox's sitting around when the XBox2 comes out (now if we could just get those fonts bigger for TV output... )
Quote (greenfellow @ Feb. 11 2005,03:41)
it would take little work to port! .
Quote
I am a novice when it comes to linux, I know people who have used it for years who still dont know much about it.
The level of assumption... It boggles the mind!
Any port will take a substantial amout of work, perhaps the Xbox port would take less, but probably not.
And the fact that Robert does not have an Xbox doesn't help either (not sure about John, but I don't think he does either).
I do have an Xbox.
But am I willing to risk making it unusuable to port DSL to it?
No.
Besides, from what I've read, Xboxes don't like booting from a CD, they have to have Linux installed on the hdd, and DSL is a live-cd distro.
-J.P.It is possible for someone to port DSL over to an xbox, but this should not be done by the DSL team. They are busy enough as it is.
Basically, the core of DSL is a stripped down KNOPPIX, so if anyone has Knoppix working with the xbox maybe you can borrow some of their learnings.
FYI, in general the xbox does not make for a very good personal computer. It's a nice game machine or media player but you can get a cheap new PC or a higher quality used PC with more power for much less money.
Although the coolness factor for an XBOX with DSL on it would be high Next Page...
original here.
)