Over the past few weeks I have been setting up Linux on my XBox, following the instructions from Xbox-Linux.org. I ended up getting Xebian setup on it and running really good but it is running an older 2.4 kernel.

Since I recently decided to install Asterisk onto the XBox, I needed to get the kernel sources and figured I might as well upgrade to a newer 2.6 kernel. After a good day, and many slow compiles I now have a working 2.6.8 kernel with the XBox patches.

eric@xebian:~$ uname -a
Linux xebian.home.theadmin.org 2.6.8-xbox #2 Sun Mar 4 19:58:45 PST 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

Since I have my apt repository setup, I even made a deb package for it. This kernel comes with an initrd built in so it should boot up but you must edit the /etc/linuxboot.cfg file. If you add in the new kernel, the bootloader will fall back and try to boot each additional kernel if one fails.

# /boot/linuxboot.cfg
title v2_6
kernel /boot/vmlinuz
append root=/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 devfs=mount kbd-reset xbox=hdd 
xboxfb y

title v2_4
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.31-xbox
append root=/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 devfs=mount kbd-reset xbox=hdd 
xboxfb y

default v2_6

It also appears that the bootloader for XBox will load the initrd that matches the version of the kernel. So with my configuration the “/boot/initrd” would get loaded for my v2_6 kernel and the “/boot/initrd-2.4.31-xbox” would get loaded for the v2_4 kernel.

Eric Davis