I decided to do something with my old original XBOX that has been laying in the closet for a couple of years now. I’ve heard about being able to hack them to run Linux and thought that it would be cool to be able to host a website on a hacked XBOX.
I feel the need to state this for any of the Microsoft people out there. I am not demonstrating how to play illegal copied video games nor do I condone this practice. I am demonstrating how I will use free and open source software to run a website on an obsolete piece of hardware that I own.
Most of the steps that I am executing can be found in great detail on various websites. I am going to pull them all together at a high level and share my own experiences.
These sites are VERY helpful
http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Software_Method_HOWTO
http://xbox-hq.com/html/postx5188-0-0.html
Assuming that you already have an XBOX…. here are the high level steps that you need to take.
1 – Download appropriate software ( “special” saved games and tools). You will probably have to use some kind of torrent.
2 – Create a gave-save friendly USB drive
3 – Copy “special” saved games to the USB drive from your PC
4 – Copy “special” saved games from USB drive to XBOX hard drive
5 – Run required game
6 – Load the “special” saved game which contains a very small emergency linux distribution
7 – Run the emergency linux
8 – Connect to your XBOX emergency linux machine via telnet session from a PC on your network
9 – Run full blown linux installer on the XBOX via telnet session.
I will probably not covert the website creation details in this series of posts. A future topic will cover how to host a website from your home for free. This series of posts will just get the web site server running
