On Thu, 5 May 2005, Mark Knecht wrote:
My main interest in this area is one that most here won't probably have much experience on - Gentoo-xbox. In the case of Gentoo proper running on the XBox there is a large amount of confusion and differing opinions about BIOS. Clearly you have to make a change to get Gentoo to even load on the XBox because the M$ BIOS doesn't boot from a DVD. However what the BIOS does in that architecture after boot seems unclear to me from the small amount of reading I've done so far. For the XBox there is the Cromwell BIOS but there are also other BIOS's done by groups outside of Linux development. (As best I understand them.) Certainly most are to allow more sorts of game playing and hacks, which is of no interest to me, but some of them allow booting from a DVD, hence my interest in whether to use one fo them or wait for a version of Cromwell for my XBox. (Since it isn't out yet.)
Afaiu, you don't need to modify the bios. http://www.xbox-linux.org/Software_Method_HOWTO
If you still want to modify the bios:
http://www.xbox-linux.org/Hardware_Method_HOWTO
Afaiu, you cannot play xbox games anymore with one/some of the option(s) above.
Also: http://www.xbox-linux.org/Version_1.6_Warning
While the XBox and a normal PC aren't identical by any means it seems to me that the Linux kernel running on either of these platforms is, more or less, the same and would likely make the same sort of requests to BIOS if it had any interest in doing so. If the 2.6.XX kernel on an X86 PC doesn't talk to BIOS it seems a reasonable change that the same kernel on an XBox won't either, but that's a guess.
Yes, the xbox is a normal pc... http://www.xbox-linux.org/FAQ#The_Xbox_is_a_standard_PC.2C_isn.27t_it.3F
and... http://www.xbox-linux.org/docs/xboxpc.html
Best regards
Peter K
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