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FreeBSD Ported to XBox

Posted by timothy on Wed Jul 27, 2005 07:17 AM
from the mulitplicity dept.
Operating Systems Software BSD Hardware Entertainment Games
NetFiber writes "FreeBSD has been ported to the XBox. "Over the last 2 weeks, I have been working on a port of FreeBSD for the XBox. The port is fully functional. The framebuffer is fully supported, same goes for sound and USB devices (such as an USB keyboard). Only ethernet is missing, currently." The FreeBSD on XBox website is here, downloads included." Update: 07/27 14:50 GMT by T : Rink Springer writes with a request that you use the primary mirror instead.
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  • But does (Score:5, Funny)

    by mboverload (657893) on Wednesday July 27 2005, @07:19AM (#13175083) Journal
    But does FreeBSD on Xbox run Linux? Yeah.

  • It may not be a hoax... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MaestroSartori (146297) on Wednesday July 27 2005, @07:20AM (#13175087) Homepage
    ...but:

    "This XBE file hasn't been tested, as we don't have a modchipped XBOX."

    Anyone out there with a chipped xbox know if this works at all? :)

      • Re:It may not be a hoax... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by DrSkwid (118965) on Wednesday July 27 2005, @08:35AM (#13175486) Homepage Journal
        my xbox gathers dust, fbsd on it would be a nice toy

        > platforms intended for one purpose and one purpose alone (gaming)
        do you know what a turing machine is ?

      • Re:It may not be a hoax... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        This is what people do in their free time...it's a hobby. People do hobbies for enjoyment. Why do some people feel that OSS needs to have a real use?

        • This is why the OSS movement is crap. It's all about free software. Using the term OSS makes you forget that this is all about increasing freedom in the first place, not about increasing some arbitrary standard such as the "userbase of the community", especially when said community is ill-defined.

          Haven't you thought that maybe - just maybe - the goals of people participating in the OSS movement (as opposed to the FSF movement) are just somewhat different from yours?

          Sheesh, even Stallman of all FSF peop

  • Ethernet missing? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by coflow (519578) on Wednesday July 27 2005, @07:21AM (#13175089)
    This is pretty cool, although from TFA: Only ethernet is missing, currently, as the binary only driver in /usr/ports/net/nvnet fails with an error 5, for some reason. Assistance there would be very welcome.

    I suspect this is a feature that would be fairly important to most users.

    • Re:Ethernet missing? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by zyche (784345)
      If all you whiners cared to actually RTFA you would have spotted "A lot of USB ethernet controllers" listed under hardware support. These doesn't cost much these days, and *BSD supports most of them.

      • Re:Ethernet missing? (Score:2, Redundant)

        by nxtw (866177)
        I'm sure they'd all work great with the Xbox's USB ports. That is, after you get an adapter for the controller ports. But why spend money on getting USB to work just to have Ethernet over USB 1, when there's already a builtin 10/100 Ethernet port right on the back?
      • Whilst Im sure you put in alot of effort and should be commended, claiming "fully functional" whilst admitting that something *isn't* functional seems like asking for trouble.

        "Almost fully functional" would have gotten you almost as much credit without the hastle.

      • Re:Ethernet missing? (Score:5, Informative)

        by cbreaker (561297) on Wednesday July 27 2005, @08:08AM (#13175338) Journal
        You can't just plug in "a lot of USB ethernet controllers" because the XBox controller ports, albiet USB, are not a USB connection. You need a converter, and THEN the controller. And when all is said and done, you'd left with a crappy 11Mbit of USB Ethernet speeds whereas the onboard controller (e100) is actually very good.

        I'm not whining - I really don't give a crap either way. But this isn't a solution by any means.

        • Re:Ethernet missing? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Anubis350 (772791) on Wednesday July 27 2005, @09:38AM (#13175992)
          you can quickly and easily make a MS USB to normal USB adapter with a USB extension cord, a solder gun, solder, and an xbox breakwaway cable in about in 5 mins... Instructions are on the linux xbox website

    • Re:Ethernet missing? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Ezdaloth (675945)

      No shit this driver fails, it is supposed to support NVidia nforce2 chipset with AMD processors. Not the (also nvidia) network chip in the xbox. The ethernet chip is probably quite similar to the nforce chip, but the rest of the hardware isn't ...

      The best bet might be to port the linux forcedeth drivers. They're the only OSS drivers for the chip.

  • BSD vs. Linux (tm) (Score:5, Funny)

    by Max Romantschuk (132276) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Wednesday July 27 2005, @07:21AM (#13175090) Homepage
    The perfect way to prove BSD is more secure than Linux: no ethernet.

    I'll go RTFA now...
  • ..the original Xbox is dead. They better release the next one quickly!
      • I don't expect the Xbox 360 will be as easy to hack as the Xbox. The Xbox was a bit of a rush-job (Microsoft were a latecomer to the party as it was) and it shows - unused buses still brought out to pads (probably for testing purposes), etc...

  • Two guys, ages 19 and 21 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ReformedExCon (897248) <reformed.excon@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 27 2005, @07:22AM (#13175101)
    It's simply amazing the amount of progress two dedicated youths can make in such a short time.

    One thing I used to have a lot of time to think about was how much time I was wasting, having forced myself into a very uncomfortable place. It's quite heartening to see these kids doing great work, even if it is just for themselves as a hobby (even moreso, in my opinion).

    I'm not sure that the thing is useful, but it's definitely a cool hack.

    Is anyone offering them a job yet?
  • And they'll already start working on Linux for the Xbox 360, though. Take your pick ;)

    In seriousness though, I applaud the effort. Maybe with this knowledge of what had to be changed and a quick port of Linux to the 360, maybe FreeBSD can be ported to the 360 with a much quicker turnaround.
    • I doubt any leasons learned in porting either Linux or FreeBSD to the XBox will help with the XBox 360. The 360 has a significantly different architecture than the original.

  • XBox pwn3d (Score:5, Funny)

    by spaztech (899194) on Wednesday July 27 2005, @07:52AM (#13175254)

    All obvious jokes aside, this is an awesome job by these young up-and-comers. Porting FreeBSD to a Microsoft gaming console, what a task.

    1: Load FreeBSD on XBox
    2: Install nMap, Nessus & Metasploit, hack CitiBank
    3: ??
    4: Profit!!

    When the F.B.I. shows up just play dumb and say, "I don't have a computer."
  • A secure Microsoft machine? Now I've seen it all...
  • If they could make it run windows then it could rum games. An XBox with a wide game selection. . . That would be nice.
  • Has anyone tried to a mod an XBox to play Atari 2600 games? Now that would be retro. :)

  • Only!? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Only ethernet is missing"

    For sale '94 Pontiac Grand Prix 150,000 miles. No engine.

  • In related news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by NotFamous (827147) on Wednesday July 27 2005, @09:06AM (#13175690) Homepage Journal
    I have ported NetBSD to run on my toaster. I have full support for quad-processing (requires four slots), hyper-breading and hot swapping. Unfortunately, fork() is not currently implemented...

  • Linguistic note... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pegr (46683) on Wednesday July 27 2005, @10:20AM (#13176363) Homepage Journal
    The framebuffer is fully supported, same goes for sound and USB devices (such as an USB keyboard).
     
    Interesting that the submitter choose "an" rather than "a" before USB. This implies he pronounces USB "usby" rather than "yoo-ess-bee". I've never heard that before. Anyone else? Do I sound square pronouncing each letter of USB?
     

      • Re:Linguistic note... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by pegr (46683)
        Post: The framebuffer is fully supported, same goes for sound and USB devices (such as an USB keyboard).

        pegr: Interesting that the submitter choose "an" rather than "a" before USB. This implies he pronounces USB "usby" rather than "yoo-ess-bee". I've never heard that before. Anyone else? Do I sound square pronouncing each letter of USB?

        88NoSoup4U88: Isn't the rule that once a word starts with a vowel, you have to use 'an' : It doesn't have anything to do with how you pronounce it, does it ? [/non native

    • Because things don't just fall together 100% working. It wouldn't make much sense to port the Ethernet driver before you got the basic functionality working, right?

      The Ethernet driver will come in time, I'm sure. If you're desperate, get some sort of USB solution until then - USB is reported to work just fine.

    • Re:Er... why? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by metternich (888601)
      The Hardware on the Xbox is sold at a lost by Microsoft. (They make their profits off the games they sell.) Therefore, if you can mod an Xbox to be a regular computer, you can get better performance/$$ than you would otherwise be able to get.
      • That was certainly true at the time of the Xbox launch. But it's been a while since. Prices on the cpu's hard drives, etc, etc, used in it have all dropped significantly since. I wonder how much of a loss the sale of a new one actually costs them these days.

        • Re:Er... why? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by aderusha (32235)
          The price of the components has certainly come down, and if you open up a recent (version 1.6) xbox and compare it to an earlier version, you'll find that they have greatly streamlined the number of discreet components inside.

          However, the xbox originally sold for $399 and now retails for $150. Who knows if they're still loosing money on these, but I'd guess they still are subsidizing the software/online business by taking a loss on the hardware.

    • Re:Er... why? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      • Cheap server to play with
      • Play any media the likes of mplayer can play
      • Act as a jukbox
      • Browse, email etc on the TV
      • A backup server for rsync
      • Other uses for other people


      Just because you can't cope with the thought others have imagination and enjoy these things, doesn't mean people should stop because of your opinion!

    • Re:Er... why? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bass_ackwards (804625)

      As soon as they can get the Ethernet working I can have the low cost, small form factor webserver I have been looking for.

      Thats why. Also, throw in a bigger hard drive and you have a great backup server or file server.

      Just don't try hosting any slashdot stories. Even a cluster [slashdot.org] of these things couldn't handle that.

    • Are we forgetting the tons of slashdot posts when Linux was made to run on the xbox? Or when Linspire was ready to pay someone a hefty prize for getting Linux to boot on an xbox without a modchip? I think this is news for nerds. If you don't like it, don't waste your time reading it.
      • The prizes are mostly to get things BOOTING once you get past that ... it's just another PC.

        I doubt these kids invented a new boot procedure. If anything they'll do what everyone else does and use a game exploit or a modchip.

        Whoopy.

        Of course when I was 16-17 I was writing 8051 software [this is ca. 1998] on a 80C32 eval board I borrowed from a friend. It had no OS, 8KB of ram and a 12Mhz processor. Nobody gave me a slashdotting for that ...

        The xbox has a 700Mhz processor, 64MiB of ram [which despite all
          • It's neat but nothing spectacular. This "oh look at what a 19 yr old kid can do!".

            You know what I did when I was 19? Started writing LibTomCrypt. Admitedly it sucked then but now it's a hell of a lot better and used throughout the industry. You can literally buy things in electronic stores that use my software.

            And I've never been paid a dime to distribute LibTomCrypt. Though I've gotten other things which is why I don't complain [e.g. free books, tshirts, occasional donation, stipend to conference, etc

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