Puuh, this weekend, we finally got round 'repairing' my girlfriend's xbox (Rev 1.6). We tried to install it over 6 months ago, but failed. In the end, I think this was because of bad media (the xbox is very picky about media. CD-R's won't work at all, CD-RW did boot, but well. DVD-R seem fine, though).

Anyway, here is a recipe how we got it running:

1. get somehow the slayer image from http://slayer.xbox-scene.com/ (yes, this is tricky. You basically need to find their IRC channel, and read the topic how to learn the download links)
2. download the self extracting rar. Yes, it is an .exe file, but you can extract it easily with rar on the cmdline.
3. learn the password for the rar by reading the release announcement on the website
4. burn it to DVD-R media, boot your xbox.
5. we choose to reformat the hd, because we installed a spare 80GB hard drive. (maybe we install a bigger one later)
6. be just happy

Note that the slayer image seems to offer to flash some other BIOS versions in the MOD Chip. we didn't do this this weekend, because we already did that 6 months ago. IIRC it was a EVO-X M8+ BIOS we flashed. Honestly, I have no idea if this was a good decision, but the xbox works for us now :).

What can we do now with the xbox? Here a couple of ideas:

1. Install Xebian from http://sf.net/projects/xbox-linux
2. Install games on the hard drive. Even savegames work
3. Use the included copy of xbmc to watch videos, listen to music, watch dvds
4. Play some old roms (SNES, NES, etc) with the included emulators

Upcoming tasks:

1. Upgrade xebian to kernel 2.6.16 or later in order to use our dvb-t stick
2. install mythtv

More ideas?

~~DISCUSSION~~

english tech