Linux on the Xbox 360

I thought I heard something to that effect - people who bought the linux kit got headhunting calls 9-12 months later.

"rooted" is the more normal description of 'I got to install some code on it which the original vendor did not want me to be able to install' surely?

Or has geek english moved on to invert the greybeard meaning of "bricked" ?

1: https://youtu.be/U7VwtOrwceo

And this is definitely the type of project someone is doing for fun anyway. Unfortunately even at idle the 360 isn't super power efficient, drawing ~70 watts or more, or else this could actually be a pretty neat project for repurposing a 360 as a NAS or something.

You're 15 years behind on this one.

While the original "Xenon" Xbox 360s are probably almost all dead by now, as are the first-gen Elites with the "Zephyr" board, the late-2007 "Falcon" revision that brought HDMI to the mass market models was a significant improvement and the late-2008 "Jasper" revision basically solved the problem. RRoDs on "Phat" consoles with the Jasper boards or any of the "Slim" variants are incredibly rare and unrelated to the flaw that impacted older revisions.

My own anecdotal experience matches the internet reports as well. I was deep in the OG Xbox modding world so a lot of my friends are also big Xbox fans and as a result we've owned a lot of Xbox 360s. As far as I'm aware no one I know still has a functioning Xenon or Zephyr. Falcon and Opus are roughly 50/50, and I don't know of a single Jasper or later console that has failed randomly. A few have been taken out through obvious external forces like lightning, children, and/or gravity but nothing like the earlier consoles where you could just be playing a game, it freezes, reboots, and then the lights we all feared come on.

A bunch of those consoles now have succumbed to optical drive failures and most of the rest are getting pickier about what discs they'll load, but that's an entirely different thing common to all sorts of older hardware. All those machines still play any games you want to off the hard drive.

For a hacker like the author, anything is a good learning practice and thus good time spent.

That being said, you have a good point -- For people really looking for a serious alternative to computers, they shouldn't look too deep into Xbox 360. Thanks for putting the warning about RROD here. You've added a valuable warning sign to the original content.

Corona, Jasper, and Trinity boards are widely considered the most reliable revisions. This coveres late fat and all slim models produced from ~2008 up to 2013. The "E" model introduced in 2013 is also pretty reliable, but some units are not good for modding.

also i remember there was a modified boot loader (chromwell, iirc?) and some person had managed to solder an additional 64mb chip to bring the total memory to a whopping 128MB.