Quote Originally Posted by eco2geek
Wow, sounds like you know a lot about Debian, then. The XBox sounds like it would be especially hard to configure. Don't you have to start out by defeating a built-in encryption mechanism?
Well, not a lot just being forced to do it this way(no repartitioning, no CD burner) which does teach me a bit about it. The Xbox one sounds hard but is actually simple because of my past experience with installing Debian in a constrained environment. There is some clever hack which can load linux(vmlinuz + initrd), more like a boot loader say GRUB. Once it is installed on Xbox, it is just a matter of putting the right vmlinuz+initrd(and rootfs) and it is no different than a normal PC.

On a PC, I just installed a copy of GRUB which again can load different combination of vmlinuz+initrd.

Same goes with colinux.

So once this relationship is sorted out and a little understanding of the magical debootstrap, I can install debian woody on all the machine I have been able to touch without any problem. All one needs is a simple linux with wget(to grab the debootstrap tarball). I have written a simple howto on the Xbox mailing list on how to do it with linux + busybox(that is really a minimal linux). The same can be done on almost any PC. Better yet, it can be done remotely(as one can put a simple telnetd there). That is how I did it on Xbox(it is basically headless), all from my PC. So theoretically, one can put a diskette(or CD) in any PC that has network support then remotely 'upgrade' it into a full featured linux(be it desktop or server).


BTW, colinux is a very promising alternative for those can't get away from XP. I am typing this under IE on XP with colinux-0.6 running in another window and insalling yet another debian woody with VNC server which I can VNC into and run a copy of mozilla. The only catch though is the multi-media stuff won't be able to run but that is not an issue for me as I prefer to run them on Xbox displaying on the big TV


Will try to get a full featured KDE 3.2 there and see what it would be like. KDE and XP running on the same machine would be pretty interesting.