Just Uber

Now before you fire up your trusty keyboard to shoot me down in flames for suggesting this. I want you to think about the continuing challenges that Ubuntu (and Linux in general) face as they compete against Microsoft for a share of the desktop OS market.

A good place to start is here, at a Slashdot article entitled ‘Why Linux Doesn’t Spread - the Curse of Being Free’.

You see people just don’t trust things that are free. They have been conditioned to believe that ‘you get what you pay for’ and hence find it hard to see the value of free software. As the article rightly points out, as far as Joe Newbie is concerned both Windows and Linux are free to him, so he will have the one worth $300 thank you very much…

If you read through the comments of the article you come to another observation. Lets assume that Joe Newbie has got Ubuntu installed on his laptop. He opens up his favourite .mp3 album on the PC and gets a prompt for a codec. Now although Joe is a newbie, he knows that .mp3’s work fine out of the box on Windows so why not on Ubuntu? Uh-oh! His mistrust of Ubuntu increases.

OK, so what can we do about it?

Well, if you’re observant, you will have noticed that we now have an all free software version of Ubuntu. Every single piece and parcel of it is comprised of free software. Great eh?

Why not also create an Ubuntu variant which includes (out of the box) support for things like .mp3, dvd, wmv et al and charge for it? Canonical could license the technologies needed to legally create such a piece of software and sell it to the customer.

As long as the price was kept reasonable, Canonical could sell a ready to rock, fully spec’d up operating system to OEMs. It could also sell a boxed retail version to the public (although of course these sales wouldn’t be as large) through distribution channels such as PC World or Amazon. Chuck in six months technical support helpline access for a few quid and you provide a support channel for the punters too!

I think that if Canonical could do this, Ubuntu would become more credible in the eyes of the ignorant computer user and we just may be able to entice him across…

Hull for those of you who don’t know - it is a city which is trying really hard. Hull is working its arse off to drag itself out of economic and social decline and to establish itself as a ‘top 10 digital city’.

After years of treating this as back page news, the local media really seem to have got behind the people to protest about the Kingston Communications monopoly here in Hull.

The Hull Daily Mail have published details of a poll on the Prime Ministers Petitions site urging:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to scrap the monopoly that Kingston Communications hold in Hull for broadband users.”

So far, the response has been pretty good. As I write this, there are 1,259 signatories. That’s over one thousand in the single day the petition was advertised by the Hull Daily Mail.

The BBC are helping out too. Check out this video giving some background on the problems we face here in Hull.

The more publicity we bring to this, the better our chances of fighting against the suppressive monopoly that stifles the economic development of Hull. If you can, I ask that you take the time to write on your website or blog a little piece on what’s happening here in Hull to help spread the word.

For more information, you can always check out the unofficial Karoo Forums website.

Thanks for reading.

Again, the standard disclaimer. This like any other type of mod can jigger your Xbox!

This time round though the risk is slightly less. If you make a mistake on your new hard drive it’s not the end of the world. You should be able to replace the original drive again as long as you are careful with it!

Oooh, mental note - you might want to revert back to the EvolutionX dash for your backup, rather than the XBMC. It’s not obligatory, it just may give you a bit more backup in case anything goes wrong.

In this the final stage of my Xbox modification project, I’m going to cover removing the existing drive to install a larger (320 GB in my case) hard disk.

To accomplish this we’re going to need to take the backups recovered in the last tutorial and use them to image the larger drive. Once prepared, the existing drive can be removed and the larger one inserted.

First of all, ensure that you have backups of the following.

C: Drive
E: Drive
Eeprom (Specifically the eeprom.bin file)

Unpack the xboxhdm archive referred to in the last tutorial onto your Windows XP desktop. Take the C and E folders and use them to replace the existing C and E folders in the xboxhdm\linux folder. Take the eeprom.bin file and put it into the xboxhdm\linux\eeprom folder.

In the root of the xboxhdm folder, you should find a batch file named make-iso-win. Running it creates an .iso image which you need to burn using your favourite CD burning software. This creates a custom Linux Live CD which will allow you to reimage your larger hard disk drive.

Take any old PC and unplug the IDE cables from the mainboard. Plug the cable into the IDE socket attaching the CDROM as the secondary device and your large hard disk drive as the primary device. In my experience, cable selection often goes wrong; so you might have to fiddle with jumper settings. Check the BIOS to ensure that the devices are set up correctly as the Live CD won’t work if they aren’t.

OK - that out of the way you can now boot from your newly created Linux CD.

1) Select option 1
2) Type xboxhd
3) Choose option 1 again (Build a new Xbox Hard Drive from Scratch) If you get errors at this stage check you setup the CDROM and HDD properly.
4) At this stage the installer should ask you whether or not you want the files from C and E transfering to the drive. You do!
5) When asked if you want to create an F drive, you do too.

Now you have nearly finished creating your new larger hard disk drive.

Reboot the PC, and start from the Linux Live CD again. Type ‘3′ to enter the locking/unlocking utility screen and type ‘lockhd -a’ when presented with the prompt. The hard disk drive will be locked using the code located in the eeprom.bin file you saved on the Live CD. It is now prepared for insertion to the Xbox.

Now simply remove the existing drive and replace with your new larger drive and start up the Xbox. It should now boot up nicely!

If you have selected a very large hard disk, you may not be able to see all of it. This seems to be due to some of the limitations of xboxhdm so you will need to grab a copy of the UnleashX dashboard to reformat the final partitions of the hard disk.

Once you get hold of a copy, FTP it to the Apps folder on your XBox. You can then select it as an application from the currently installed dash - and once you have it running - you’ll find options for reformatting partitions on the hard drive.

Finally, to wind the project up, I thought I’d treat you with some screenshots from the XBox Media Centre (Click to enlarge).