Linux on old xbox

psd99

psd99

psd99

Soldato
Joined
7 Sep 2008
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I was wondering if any of you managed to get a distro of linux installed on the old xbox?

I have been considering this so that I can sit down in front of the telly and surf the net and be able to show everyone things on the internet.

Have any of you got it working?

My problem is I can't seem to find one of those old school xpad to usb converters. Unless I snap the wires in half and rejoin 'em.

Any ideas?
 
I used to use a version of DSL (xdsl?) on my xbox. The version i had contained a version of firefox for web browsing and i think it had an on screen keyboard ( i used a usb convertor so i can't properly comment on that)

It worked quite well if i recall correctly so might be worth looking into that
 
I did have Gentoox installed on my XBox and technical it works fine but it too slow to be of much use. It supposed to be a lot faster if you get your xbox upgraded to 128mb of Ram but it a tricky job to do yourself and expensive to pay someone to do it. Overall you're probably better off buy a second hand desktop/laptop as it will be faster and more flexable.
 
Jamesdavid3 said:
There no point of all that Effort to do anything else with the Orignal Xbox than playing games on it.

waste of time.
Click to expand...
You obviously have never tried XBMC. It's a fantastic way to have a cheap, easy to use media rig.

And whoever said it had to be worth it? Sometimes it's good to do things just for the challenge of trying something new.
 
Jamesdavid3 said:
There no point of all that Effort to do anything else with the Orignal Xbox than playing games on it.

waste of time.
Click to expand...

Whereas I personally don't think it's worth doing anything with the original Xbox these days other than using it for XBMC.

It's still something to play around with regardless and it makes a change from just playing older games.
 
XBMC is one of the best uses for an old xbox, as long as your not interested in HD content it will play nearly anything. Installing Linux on one is possible as long as you don't have the 1.6/1.6b revision as no one ever managed to fix an overscan issues with the display chip. It isn't too hard to do but as Geffen said it is terribly slow as it only have a 700 Mhz CPU and 64MB RAM, not something you could comfortable browse the modern web with. The PS3 and Wii both have web browsers that are better suited to that.

If you can't find a converter you could always pick up a USB hub (£1) from the pound shops and an old gamepad and join the cables. The ports on the Xbox are all USB so you can attach a hub to them without any problem. This gives you 4 USB ports for keyboards, mice and memory sticks etc.

I am in the process of migrating away from the Xbox now as I have a HDTV and want something with a higher resolution. I have an EeeBox (ASUS EeePC in a box) which is an ideal replacement and uses about 20W idle (less than the Xbox). I have modded the IR dongle from the xbox to USB so I can still use the xbox remote to control it (see the bottom of this thread). I am undecided on the software at the moment, XBMC runs fine on it under Windows but the hardware support is nonexistant at the moment which means all the decoding is pushed to the tiny little Atom CPU and not offloaded to the GPU. I feel this is due to it being an early project on the Windows platform, I'm sure it will change over time though. MediaPortal (was a fork of XBMC) on the otherhand does do hardware support (it offloads the work to WMP).

Boxee (also a fork of XBMC) looks to be an interesting project but there is no Windows version yet and I don't know what the hardware requirements are going to be like.
 
Hi all thanks for the replies.

I got XBMC on there already and it is great. I stream my files across and it will play almost anything that I throw at it. I am very happy with that except the bit where I can't browse the web.

Even if it is slow I might just try it out with an old IDE HDD that I got lying around.

Nice pictures mate was that easy to do?

I heard that USB works on 3 wires I will have to do something like that to get a working USB keyboard.
 
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