Success at installing Gentoox 100% natively !!

Talk about anything related to Gentoox or Gentoo.
chuddy117
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Post by chuddy117 »

Welcome to native-land. My business partner and I have successfully installed Fedora Core 100% native on the xbox and are using it for our production environment. We didn't like the fact that the "native" install with gentoox was still using almost 5 gigs of dead space that couldn't be used. Kinda tough when you try to use the stock 8 gig hard drives. Not that it's such a huge accomplishment, but when your looking to run linux, we found gentoox to be extremely limiting as far as compatability (darn glibc errors for those of you compiling your own apps). We also set it up so if the hard drive is placed in the xbox, it will boot just fine and when its placed in a pc, it will also boot. Works great for people who are worried about having a proprietary linux build. With our build, you can seamlessly swap between pc and xbox. Just somethin to think about.

EDIT: Our forums are located at http://www.linuxbochs.com/phpBB2 and are hosted on one of our 128 mb fedora xbox's, our other site is http://www.rockbochs.com which is under development. Don't forget to check out the equipment we have for sale here http://www.rockbochs.com/network/index.htm
Tsuroerusu
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Post by Tsuroerusu »

chuddy117 wrote:Welcome to native-land. My business partner and I have successfully installed Fedora Core 100% native on the xbox and are using it for our production environment. We didn't like the fact that the "native" install with gentoox was still using almost 5 gigs of dead space that couldn't be used. Kinda tough when you try to use the stock 8 gig hard drives. Not that it's such a huge accomplishment, but when your looking to run linux, we found gentoox to be extremely limiting as far as compatability (darn glibc errors for those of you compiling your own apps). We also set it up so if the hard drive is placed in the xbox, it will boot just fine and when its placed in a pc, it will also boot. Works great for people who are worried about having a proprietary linux build. With our build, you can seamlessly swap between pc and xbox. Just somethin to think about.

EDIT: Our forums are located at http://www.linuxbochs.com/phpBB2 and are hosted on one of our 128 mb fedora xbox's, our other site is http://www.rockbochs.com which is under development. Don't forget to check out the equipment we have for sale here http://www.rockbochs.com/network/index.htm
Very interesting, I'm not too thrilled about Fedora for the Xbox, because it's not the most optimized for the Xbox, but it's not too bad.

I use Xebian on my LinuXbox right now because it offers the option to install natively. Works great, it's sad ShALLaX won't offer the native option. But hey, at least it's possible to do, I've done it before.

Hey chuddy117, if you're hosting a site off an Xbox, did you compile Apache yourself, and if so did you set some special optimization options ?
Richard M. Stallman: "Freedom to redistribute and change software is a human right that must be protected."
chuddy117
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Post by chuddy117 »

Let me preface this by saying that we didn't do this for people who just want to run linux as an app to play around with. What we've done is intended for serious people looking to run a powerful Linux server on an inexpensive platform. We needed to stay away from the proprietary xbox linux builds and make something that is compatible with both xbox's and pc's AT THE SAME TIME. I can safely say we've done this, and it works absolutely flawlessly. In fact, we have an old PIII that we use to set everything up since it is easier to work with a real monitor and a keyboard that doesn't require adapters. Once we get the basic functions working, we simply remove the hard drive and install it in an xbox to install in our server cabinet. From there we can SSH in and do the rest of our work. You may look at our setup at the bottom of this page: http://www.rockbochs.com/network/index.htm

As far as apache, everything we've done is custom compiled for our needs, and apache is no different. The reason we chose the Fedora build is because they are considered by many to be the standard linux build, albeit bloated, which is why we go through and strip out what we don't need. However, we still have the ability to use RPM's if need be. Hope this answers your questions!
Tsuroerusu
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Post by Tsuroerusu »

chuddy117 wrote:Let me preface this by saying that we didn't do this for people who just want to run linux as an app to play around with. What we've done is intended for serious people looking to run a powerful Linux server on an inexpensive platform. We needed to stay away from the proprietary xbox linux builds and make something that is compatible with both xbox's and pc's AT THE SAME TIME. I can safely say we've done this, and it works absolutely flawlessly. In fact, we have an old PIII that we use to set everything up since it is easier to work with a real monitor and a keyboard that doesn't require adapters. Once we get the basic functions working, we simply remove the hard drive and install it in an xbox to install in our server cabinet. From there we can SSH in and do the rest of our work. You may look at our setup at the bottom of this page: http://www.rockbochs.com/network/index.htm

As far as apache, everything we've done is custom compiled for our needs, and apache is no different. The reason we chose the Fedora build is because they are considered by many to be the standard linux build, albeit bloated, which is why we go through and strip out what we don't need. However, we still have the ability to use RPM's if need be. Hope this answers your questions!
I see, but chuddy117, no Xbox Linux build can be proprietary, thanks to the GPL. And actually Xebian will work on both PC and Xbox at the same time, the way the Xbox Linux patches work is by autodetecting the presents of the Xbox and then avoid the PCI bug and activate special stuff. Another good example is the Gentoo LiveCD for the Xbox, it boost fine on both a PC and the Xbox (Believe me I tried it out).

By the way, since you're using Fedora on the Xbox, do you X-Window with XFCE or are you sticking with the oldschool-pretty-much-always-works-command-line system :P
The Xbox's amount of RAM is limited, I always try to keep Linux as streamlined as possible.
Richard M. Stallman: "Freedom to redistribute and change software is a human right that must be protected."
chuddy117
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Post by chuddy117 »

By "proprietary" I mean that little magic script. I prefer to use more standardized processes. I was never really a big fan of Gentoo and the emerge/portage deal. I prefer to do everything manually to keep my Linux machine nice and trimmed. Yea, you won't see me using a GUI to get around Linux, far too much overhead. I don't think someone can truly "know" linux until they learn the command line, so i'd rather stay away from the gui. Admittedly, I have never used the Xebian or the Gentoo LiveCD so I can't comment on those. If they are as easy to use as our Fedora core build, I definitely respect that. I read through the tut on the Gentoo LiveCD, but I couldn't find where they mentioned the dual boot feature. I see they said you could install gentoo on an xbox USING the LiveCD, but i didn't see where it said you could swap the drive seamlessly between xbox and PC. With our build, we simply run through the kudzu screen to unconfigure the xbox hardware, and reconfigure it for the pc hardware. Takes about 30 seconds to hit space bar at each prompt. 8) As i've said before, nothing new, just a little different.
Tsuroerusu
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Post by Tsuroerusu »

chuddy117 wrote:By "proprietary" I mean that little magic script. I prefer to use more standardized processes. I was never really a big fan of Gentoo and the emerge/portage deal. I prefer to do everything manually to keep my Linux machine nice and trimmed. Yea, you won't see me using a GUI to get around Linux, far too much overhead. I don't think someone can truly "know" linux until they learn the command line, so i'd rather stay away from the gui. Admittedly, I have never used the Xebian or the Gentoo LiveCD so I can't comment on those. If they are as easy to use as our Fedora core build, I definitely respect that. I read through the tut on the Gentoo LiveCD, but I couldn't find where they mentioned the dual boot feature. I see they said you could install gentoo on an xbox USING the LiveCD, but i didn't see where it said you could swap the drive seamlessly between xbox and PC. With our build, we simply run through the kudzu screen to unconfigure the xbox hardware, and reconfigure it for the pc hardware. Takes about 30 seconds to hit space bar at each prompt. 8) As i've said before, nothing new, just a little different.
Interresting, well, the Gentoo LiveCD works a little like KNOPPIX, a few weeks ago my KNOPPIX had too many scratches so I slapped in the Gentoo LiveCD and it came right up and I could repair my boot loader on my PC (Too much messing around in the CLi :P ).
Actually all Xbox-Linux distros will run on both PC and Xbox (With the exception of the really old ones), since the Xbox patches are disabled if it don't run on the Xbox.
No issue there.

Gentoo's Portage package manager is very very good if you have an AMD64 chip, because then every single application (A few exception are proprietary stuff like Sun's Java, Windows Media codecs and stuff like that) will be 64-bit and optimized for the Athlon 64, unlike the 64-bit Windows where stuff like Explorer still is 32-bit because Micro$oft is lazy, Linux can be anything you ask it to be :P

Imagine 512-bit Linux in 18 years :D

Anyway, since you're running Apache on Linux, if stuff gets intense and a lot of traffic is the issue, you might consider addig 64 megs of additional memory, it really increases the performance of Linux a lot.
Richard M. Stallman: "Freedom to redistribute and change software is a human right that must be protected."
chuddy117
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Post by chuddy117 »

Just so I understand you correctly, if I take my gentoox pro hard drive out of one of my xbox's and slap it in a computer, it will boot up? This is kind of embarrassing for me but I did not know that! :oops: I never saw any documentation about it so I just didn't think it was possible.

EDIT: We are running 2 xbox's with the upgraded ram. They're workin great :D
Tsuroerusu
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Post by Tsuroerusu »

chuddy117 wrote:Just so I understand you correctly, if I take my gentoox pro hard drive out of one of my xbox's and slap it in a computer, it will boot up? This is kind of embarrassing for me but I did not know that! :oops: I never saw any documentation about it so I just didn't think it was possible.

EDIT: We are running 2 xbox's with the upgraded ram. They're workin great :D
The way ShALLaX makes Gentoox is that he uses something called a loopback file system. I'm not good at describing this stuff, but it's a little like a CD image, that you mount as your hard drive.
What I've done a few months ago, I took my Xbox hard drive and put it in my PC (I've unlocked and pretty much went "Kill Bill" on it with a Seagate DiscWizard bootable floppy), then I mounted the Gentoox loopback file, and copied all of the data to the responding places on the Xbox drive, preserving file permissions. I then modified the fstab file so that it mounted the partitions of my Xbox drive as / and /home instead of the Gentoox loopback file, I also threw in a Cromwell bootloader config file into /boot. I then put the drive back in my Xbox and booted the Gentoox kernel, and it came right up, a fully FATX-less installation of Gentoox, I only had a few issues with magic because it expected the loopback file system as mount points, but nothing big just a matter of cp'ing a file :wink:

But anyway, if you do what I did, you would be able to boot Gentoox on a PC, you just need to edit the system configuration with the sound drivers and stuff to make it fully functional, but as long as chipset support is built into the kernel or the needed modules are loaded nothing would prevent you from using Gentoox on a PC. Since the Xbox is a little like a Pentium3 on an nForce2-like chipset then if you put Gentoox on a PC with an nForce2 motherboard (In this case the sound driver wouldn't need to adjusted since because in both cases you use the intel8x0 driver).

As long as we're talking about x86 Linux it will boot on pretty much ANY Intel PC out there, Linux is Linux, nothing fancy. Naturally PowerPC Linux or Sparc- UltraSPARC Linux won't boot on x86 CPUs, in that case there would be a difference :wink:
Richard M. Stallman: "Freedom to redistribute and change software is a human right that must be protected."
chuddy117
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Post by chuddy117 »

You are correct, however the point i'm trying to make is that we are trying to get away from that whole "loopback filesystem". Having a 100% native installation using a distro that is, for all practical purposes, the most compatible seems to make more sense.
Tsuroerusu
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Post by Tsuroerusu »

chuddy117 wrote:You are correct, however the point i'm trying to make is that we are trying to get away from that whole "loopback filesystem". Having a 100% native installation using a distro that is, for all practical purposes, the most compatible seems to make more sense.
Well, that was what I did, it's easy to get rid of the loopback file system. But if I were to do that I would preffer to just build a standard Gentoo system using the xbox profile in the Portage system. Mainly because Gentoox aren't "designed" to work without a loopback file system. By designed I mean that it aren't easy to maintain the distro, I mean if you are to get Xbox updates as well, because magic expects the loopback file system it can be often be trouble.
Richard M. Stallman: "Freedom to redistribute and change software is a human right that must be protected."
Mark Knecht
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Post by Mark Knecht »

Tsuroerusu wrote:
chuddy117 wrote:You are correct, however the point i'm trying to make is that we are trying to get away from that whole "loopback filesystem". Having a 100% native installation using a distro that is, for all practical purposes, the most compatible seems to make more sense.
Well, that was what I did, it's easy to get rid of the loopback file system. But if I were to do that I would preffer to just build a standard Gentoo system using the xbox profile in the Portage system. Mainly because Gentoox aren't "designed" to work without a loopback file system. By designed I mean that it aren't easy to maintain the distro, I mean if you are to get Xbox updates as well, because magic expects the loopback file system it can be often be trouble.
Correct me if I'm wrong but this whole discusssion is predicated on having an xbox that will boot using Cromwell, isn't it? I managed to install gentoo-xbox successfully on my 1.6(b) xbox but then couldn't boot it because I didn't have Cromwell. I seem to be stuck with hacked BIOS's as the Cromwell developers say it won't work now (or possibly ever) on 1.6(b) machines.

Is there a ways to get a stock gentoo-xbox installation to work with EvoX? It seemed like EvoX won't boot an ext2/3 partition and gentoo-xbox won't create a fatx partition.

Thanks,
Mark
Tsuroerusu
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Post by Tsuroerusu »

Mark Knecht wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote:
chuddy117 wrote:You are correct, however the point i'm trying to make is that we are trying to get away from that whole "loopback filesystem". Having a 100% native installation using a distro that is, for all practical purposes, the most compatible seems to make more sense.
Well, that was what I did, it's easy to get rid of the loopback file system. But if I were to do that I would preffer to just build a standard Gentoo system using the xbox profile in the Portage system. Mainly because Gentoox aren't "designed" to work without a loopback file system. By designed I mean that it aren't easy to maintain the distro, I mean if you are to get Xbox updates as well, because magic expects the loopback file system it can be often be trouble.
Correct me if I'm wrong but this whole discusssion is predicated on having an xbox that will boot using Cromwell, isn't it? I managed to install gentoo-xbox successfully on my 1.6(b) xbox but then couldn't boot it because I didn't have Cromwell. I seem to be stuck with hacked BIOS's as the Cromwell developers say it won't work now (or possibly ever) on 1.6(b) machines.

Is there a ways to get a stock gentoo-xbox installation to work with EvoX? It seemed like EvoX won't boot an ext2/3 partition and gentoo-xbox won't create a fatx partition.

Thanks,
Mark
Dude, we're not talking hacked bioses or EvoX at this forum, go to the responding forums at Xbox-Scene. At this board we talk Linux.
Richard M. Stallman: "Freedom to redistribute and change software is a human right that must be protected."
teitoku
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Post by teitoku »

Tsuroerusu wrote: and then I mounted it under KNOPPIX as /mnt/gentooxrootfs and copied all the files from /mnt/gentooxrootfs over to /mnt/hda3.
How'd you manage that? All I get is this crap:

Code: Select all

root@ttyp0[etc]# mount /mnt/hdd2/rootfs /mnt/test -t reiserfs
mount: /mnt/hdd2/rootfs is not a block device (maybe try `-o loop'?)
root@ttyp0[etc]# mount /mnt/hdd2/rootfs /mnt/test -t reiserfs -o loop
mount: Not a directory
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