XFedora

Fedora Core 6 on an Xbox

It's been well over a year since the last stable release of XFedora. In fact, XFedora5 never made it out the door because of technical problems with the Anaconda installer. (Sadly, that bad boy was just too huge to run on an Xbox). I've spent much of the past year enjoying my recent relocation back to my hometown in Honolulu, Hawaii, and haven't really had much free time to hack on personal projects. From the looks of things, it seems that much of the steam in the Xbox-Linux effort is focused on the Xbox-360, or on the 2.4.x series Linux Kernel. Indeed, the last Xbox-Linux Kernel Patch was targeted against 2.6.16 -- a whole 3 levels behind the bleeding edge.

Xorg 7.3 for Xbox [Work in Progress]

There doesn't appear to be any recent updates to the Xbox-Xorg drivers in the Xbox-Linux CVS, Sourceforge, or any other sites that I've checked.

I did find a patch in the Patches section of the Xbox-Linux Project Site on Sourceforge, which supposedly upgrades the Xorg 6.8.1.0 driver (in CVS) up to being compatible with Xorg 7.1.  I'm not sure what's going on with that patch, though -- some messages I've read on the 'Net suggest that the "Upgraded" driver is a little broken - requiring an Option "NoAccel?" "1" in the Drivers section of xorg.conf., and citing problems with DMA transfers.  Aurrgh.

Spelunking further through the Xbox-Linux CVS revision history, I stumbled across a porting effort done by Ed Hucek in the Xorg tree, where all of the work done on the XFree86 nvxbox driver was applied to the nv driver provided by Xorg.  In the checkin log, Ed notes the following:

Fedora Core 4 for Xbox (XFedora4)

 To install Fedora Core onto your Xbox, all you need is an XFedora installer disc, an HTTP Media Source, and either an Xpad, or a USB keyboard. The installer will erase F: and G: (if it exists) and use all of that space for Linux. As an Advanced User Option, you can also instruct XFedora to use the entire disk (no more Game Save area) for Linux.

The XFedora Installer is the real, out-of-box Fedora Core installer (aka "Anaconda") running on your Xbox - only the minimum required of Xbox-specific patches are applied to get Fedora Core running. You'll find that this minimalist approach is by design, as it allows you to synchronize, update, and customize your Xbox as you would any other Fedora Core machine.

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