[XanTium] passed this along to me, and did a nice job of writing it up. You’ll still need those old kernels, but here’s the scoop:
“A modified Gentoo LiveCD and new KingKong Shader Hack have been released for the Microsoft Xbox360 console that will allow you to boot Linux on your Xbox360 pretty easily! The new shader hack no longer requires a serial connection on your 360 and will load the XeLL bootloader directly from DVD. Once the bootloader ran you can insert the ‘Xenon’ modified Gentoo Minimal 2006.1 LiveCD and run Linux. As this hack uses the Hypervisor Vulnerability it will only work on Xbox360 consoles with kenrel 4532 or 4548 (downgrading is not possible at this moment as Microsoft blew-up eFuses in CPU to prevent kernel downgrades), to run the shader hack you’ll need the Xbox360 King Kong game (modified with thew new shader patch mentioned above) and to run this modifie d game disc you’ll need to flash the Xbox360 DVD-ROM drive with a modified firmware.”
Sounds absurdly difficult, but I suppose any progress is good news.
Though you have to wonder, with the competition so easily hackable with Linux being a supported feature, will Linux on the 360 ever take off? I can’t help but feel it will be like the Gamecube Linux project. Sure they got it working, but when you compared how hard it was to get Linux up and running on the GC versus the (original) Xbox, there was almost no public interest.
I bet there will be interest. I think one of the big reasons Linux never took off on the Gamecube was that in addition to be relatively slow hardware it offered no storage space, heck it didn’t even have a full sized Disc drive.
Looking at ease of use the PS2 Linux was the easiest to use but again not as compelling as the Xbox because it wasn’t as powerful and needed additional hardware to make it useful. By comparison it was easier to get a PS2 up and running but the Xbox was more useful a platform.
The PS3 might offer easy Linux installation but developers can’t use the GPU, so while cell development might be cool and everything you need in in the box, the Xbox 360 Linux is more useful because it allows full access to the system’s resources. Heck they haven’t even been able to get an SNES emulator running at full speed on the PS3’s Linux, something that the Xbox 1 did almost immediately after being hacked. The GPU counts for a lot.