Thursday, April 03, 2003
LiXbox
I'm not quite sure how this news item came in under the radar, but evidently a hacker has beat the problem of running Linux on an un-modded Xbox. This should qualify the hacker for the 100K prize put forth by Lindows founder Michael Robertson. The hack to get Linux running on the Xbox is pretty neat. It involves exploiting a security flaw in the game, "007 Agent Under Fire" and causing a buffer overflow during the load-game screen. What does this mean? It may mean that MS is screwed. The Xbox retails for about 200 bucks and (internally) is a fully functioning PC. MS just locks out the end-user from doing anything but playing games. If the /. crowd gets excited about this there could be a run on Xbox hardware. For each unit sold MS looses a bunch of money (some say as much as $150 per console.) Most likely however linux on an Xbox won't get much bigger than Linux on a Dreamcast, though there is always the possibility that it will hurt MS enough to pull the plug on the ailing Xbox experiment.
posted by JMV |
4/03/2003 11:31:00 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
