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FreeBSD/xbox Project

Introduction

FreeBSD/xbox is a port of FreeBSD which aims to run on Microsoft® Xbox® systems. This project was started by Rink Springer, who did most of the patching and coding. Ed Schouten helped with reviewing patches and he also provided details on certain Xbox internals.

Status

FreeBSD/xbox has been supported since FreeBSD 6-STABLE. The framebuffer, Ethernet, sound and USB devices (such as an USB keyboard for the console) are all supported.

In order to aid people in installing the FreeBSD/xbox port, a combined install/livecd has been created. It is available here.

Booting FreeBSD kernels

In order to boot FreeBSD you must have an up-to-date version of the Linux/xbox BIOS, called Cromwell (failure will result in your kernel crashing immediately after loading). A Cromwell with FreeBSD UFS patches (this will make it able to load a kernel directly from an UFS file system) is available in the ports tree at /usr/ports/sysutils/cromwell; it can be flashed to the EEPROM using the /usr/ports/sysutils/raincoat port (as long as your Xbox is below version 1.6).

Note: Several Xbox drives are known to reject certain types of media. Should you experience random hangs, panics or corruption during installation, try a different known-working DVD/CD-ROM.

Installing on the hard drive

You can do an installation using the Live CD's, but you will need to do everything manually. It is suggested to prepare your disk using an FreeBSD/i386 installation and set up the /boot/xboxlinux.cfg configuration file yourself, so Cromwell can determine which kernel to load.