You've probably heard enough about the just-released Spring Dashboard update already (Previous coverage: here, here and here), so we won't bore you guys with any more duplicate coverage. If you've been under a large rock all this while, our previous coverages will bring you up to speed with the latest happenings regarding the Dashboard update. The update brings a lot of great new features making your Xbox 360 experience that much more enjoyable.

Anyways, the main reason for this article is to douse the suspense surrounding the fate of people who've modified their DVD drives with a hacked firmware to play pirated games, err backups. This might sound surprising: the latest Dashboard update doesn't mess with hacked DVD drives; meaning that if you've modified your DVD drive firmware, you'll still be safe with the latest update. People having Hitachi drives haven't been lucky enough to get regular updates to the hacked firmware, but even that doesn't matter, they're safe too!

While this doesn't rule out the possibility that Microsoft might be collecting data regarding these hacked drives and waiting to do something a little later, it's safe to say that's close to being improbable. Hackers, like Commodore4Eva, have made claims that they have complete control over the DVD drive and that Microsoft can't really do anything with it. Even though Microsoft might have something up their sleeve, it would be pretty risky to do something now.

In related news, Commodore4Eva has also announced that he is working on an Xtreme Firmware v2.4 for Hitachi users which would include the latest Disc Jitter update recently packed in Xtreme 5.3 for Samsung drives. We'll keep you posted on C4E's work, stay tuned.

The team of tmbinc, Cpasjuste, stonersmurf and the rest of free60.org, who've been furiously at work porting Linux to Microsoft's Xbox 360 have just made two big releases getting us closer to the dream of having a full-blown Linux distro on our 360.

First, the Free60.org team released X.org drivers for the Xbox 360 hardware called xenosfb. X.org is the implementation of X Window System, the software used by Linux to render graphical user interfaces. This means that once distros incorporate these drivers into themselves, you can run these distros with better graphical compatibility, including higher resolution support.

And the second release is what I just talked about. Cpasjuste has released a Gentoo LiveCD (Full version - 608 MB) with these new drivers built into it. This means that you will be able to run the LiveCD with the GUI and with a lot more compatibility. The livecd uses the xenosfb drivers, plus it includes a powerpc toolchain so that you can compile and build applications on the 360 itself, without having to cross-compile applications on your PC and then transferring them to the 360. The Gentoo LiveCD contains the Gnome Desktop Environment.

Firstly, here's what the Free60.org team had to say about their new drivers:

X.org driver and a new LiveCD No April Fools' Day joke. We have released a preliminary X.org driver and Cpasjuste has built a new LiveCD which makes use of it. Unfortunately, support for Samsung drives and sound drivers are still missing.

The full article awaits after the jump!

In the short time between the first usable exploit for Xbox 360 consoles and today, we've already seen a lot of great achievements by people like tmbinc, Cpasjuste, and others. A few hours ago, a new shader exploit using the King Kong game was announced which will allow people to load XeLL and subsequently, any Linux distro without needing a serial connection with a PC.

This patch will modify the King Kong ISO to include a modified shader which will trigger the exploit. Once triggered, the exploit code will automatically eject the King Kong DVD. Just insert Cpasjuste's modified version of the Gentoo minimal LiveCD. Wait for a few seconds and it should boot right into a minimal Gentoo environment. While its only command line mode for now, you should expect a user-friendly distro like Ubuntu to be released after the necessary patches are applied.

In short, these are the things you will need:

• An Xbox 360 with an older kernel (4532 or 4548). Anything above that will not be affected by the exploit.
• A hacked DVDROM drive in the Xbox 360 so that burnt discs can be run.
• An ISO of the game King Kong (dumped by yourself hopefully, we don't encourage the use of warez)
• An ISO of the Gentoo minimal LiveCD (gentoo-xenon-minimal-2006.1.iso)
• The patcher to patch the King Kong ISO.

All in all, these things will make sure that you have a usable Linux environment on your Xbox 360. Finally, I'd personally like to thank everyone involved in this effort to make it what it is today (Felix "tmbinc" Domke, Cpasjuste, stonersmurf, xorloser and the whole free60.org team), we love you!

Anyways, here's the links for the relevant stuff. If something is considered illegal, it won't be hosted on our servers. Same goes with stuff which is in the grey area concerning its legality. As for the Gentoo ISO, we feel that we should link directly to sourceforge since the ISO will be updated quite frequently.

Download Link: King Kong Shader exploit for XeLL
Download Link: Gentoo Linux Xenon minimal LiveCD (Sourceforge Link. Click on gentoo-xenon-minimal-2006.1.iso on that page to download)
Link: King Kong Shader Exploit for the XELL Loader readme
Link: Gentoo Linux Xenon minimal-2006.1 readme

It seems that the recent Hypervisor hack, and the subsequently released Linux Loader are so good to the point that you can already load Linux distros on your 360. This is because of the great work by Felix Domke who wrote a bunch of drivers for Xbox360 hardware so that Linux could recognize it. And, as early as now, we've been hearing murmurs from the hacking community already.

Stonersmurf, a well respected hacker from xboxhacker.net, recently posted on IRC that he got Ubuntu Linux going on his 360. When asked about hardware compatibility, he pointed out that all hardware except for 3D and sound is working. Then, we hear that Cpasjuste has also successfully booted Ubuntu on his 360. Not only that, he was kind enough to provide instructions for anyone curious and brave enough to try it.

This development means that users could be looking at full fledged Linux distros working on their 360 in the near time. The only thing currently holding back everyone is the fact that you need a 360 with an older kernel version (4532 or 4548) which is a rarity. Until someone can either find a way to downgrade to an older kernel, or find a vulnerability in the new version, you would either have to wait for the new kernel to get hacked or buy an Xbox360 with an older kernel off sites like eBay.

Apart from that though, I can't wait to see where this goes. Comparing this to PS3 Linux (which has been openly supported by Sony), the only difference you have now is that sound drivers haven't been ported yet. If you don't count that, Xbox360 Linux is actually better than PS3 Linux since it's running at a much higher privelege (Hypervisor level), meaning people could fiddle around with stuff and hope to find bugs in the Xbox kernel.

You can head on over to Cpasjuste's tutorial for Ubuntu on Xbox 360 for more info.

Felix Domke, the man who made the news a little while ago when he released kernel patches for Xbox360-specific hardware, has just released a bootloader which sets up a Linux environment on your 360. While the stuff available currently isn't very exciting for the common Linux user, the future holds a lot of promise if applications get ported to the 360-specific architecture. Here's what's in the readme:

This is XeLL.

XeLL is the Xenon Linux Loader. It's a second-stage bootloader and is usually run by an exploit. The method of booting this is not a part of this project.

XeLL catches CPU threads, sets them up (basically setting HRMOR to zero), loads an ELF file from either network (tftp) or CDROM, and launches it. It also contains a flat device tree for linux.

cdrom.c includes a very simple ISO9660 parser, which tries to boot the file named ""vmlinux".

lwIP (http://www.sics.se/~adam/lwip/) is used for networking. Network config is currently hardcoded in network.c (and main.c). XeLL also contains a HTTP server. It is not really used.

XeLL is licensed under the GPL v2, and no other version.

Xenon-specific stuff of XeLL was written by Felix Domke , other parts where taken from other free sourcecodes. No non-free hardware documentation was used for developing XeLL.

XeLL is in a very early stage, but is (most of the time) fully working.

In case you're wondering, you need an Xbox360 with a buggy kernel (version 4532 or 4548). Unfortunately, if you've been on Live or tried out new games, you probably have the latest kernel update (4552) which doesn't have any known exploits currently. If you're one of the lucky ones, grab the source from the cvs repository, compile it, and use it with the Crawler360 loader to load the linux environment on the 360.

Personally, I can't wait for more great stuff from these guys. With the speed at which these things are moving forward, you can be sure that the next few weeks will bring a lot more exciting stuff. It's gonna be a great ride, and we'll be there to cover every bit of it!

If a Linux-PPC developers' mailing list is anything to go by, we might soon be looking at Linux running on our beloved Xbox360. This big news comes after other huge developments in the last fortnight or so...

First, we had the hypervisor vulnerability, which led to the first Proof of Concept Hello World homebrew code, after which we had news of a MAME emulator in the works (which should hopefully work on retail hacked 360s), and now we have news that people have been busy writing patches to get the Xbox360 to run Linux. Here's the announcement in the mailing list:

This series of patches add support for the Xbox 360 gaming console.

Note that these patches were written by different people, who want to remain anonymous. These drivers were written without hardware documentation being available.

There are probably more than some rough edges. Please comment and/or provide patches.

To actually run this, you need a special loader which exploits the recently announced vulnerability. This loader was developed seperately and should be available soon.

thanks,
Felix

Now if you're wondering if this might be fake, don't worry... Felix Domke has been in the news in the past not only in the GameCube homebrew scene, but a quick Google Search for his name shows many credible pages about him.

As for details about the patch, it is built against the Linux 2.6.20 Linux PPC kernel which has been running flawlessly on PS3 Linux distros as well. As noted previously, your Xbox360's kernel version will have to be one of the affected ones, namely, 4532 or 4548. For people having the newest kernel (4552), there doesn't seem to be a solution in sight since downgrading is currently not possible by even an external flasher.

This news, after the earlier huge announcements, shows that the homebrew/hacking scene is starting to get on a roll. We can only hope that it keeps going like this for some time to come. Stay tuned for the latest updates!

It's just been a little less than a week since the hypervisor vulnerability was first reported. In the short time between that and today, we've already seen a "Hello World" Proof of Concept being released. And today, we have a few bits of info about the first emulator for the Xbox 360. This anonymous developer was kind enough to send a few screenshots and describe what he has been up to.

First, a few screenshots:

     

Here's what he said about his project:

In light of the recent 360 hack and possibility of widespread homebrew in the future, I wanted to share some news with you and X-S.

I've been working on a port of MAME to the 360. I call it 'MAME360'.

Now for a bit about the project:

• It's based on MAME 0.112 and is fairly easy to keep up-to-date (doesn't need any messing around with like Mameox on the xbox).
• Originally it was based on SDLMAME but I've since ported a 360 specific osd layer (so SDL for the 360 exists - as an aside I also have a port of ScummVM in the works too).
• Mame doesn't include any dynarec cpu emulation on anything other than an x86 platform. So any game that is PSX or N64 based for example doesn't run at all well.
• Most other stuff (that I've tried) runs pretty well.
• At the moment it will only run on 360 dev/debug/test kits. Whether it will ever run on a hacked retail box remains to be seen.

Since there isn't much of a difference when you run code on a debug kit and a hacked retail box, it is possible that if the hypervisor vulnerability is fully exploited, it will open up the Xbox360 to a lot of homebrew. Personally, I can't wait for this to show up and be possible to run it on retail boxes as homebrew.

With regards to the big news this week about the hypervisor vulnerability, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to create a Proof-Of-Concept exploit which exploited the vulnerability. And that's exactly what seems to have happened - a relative unknown, crawler360, has released what would be the first homebrew program on the 360. At this point, the code's pretty basic, printing out "Hello World" and opening up the Serial interface so that you can communicate with the 360 through your PC.

This exploit code hides itself inside the shader files in the game King Kong. It was probably a mistake by the creators and Microsoft to leave out a hole which allowed you to edit the shader files and not worry about breaking the signature. This exploit basically crashes the 360, then takes control of the hypervisor to make it jump to a piece of code which isn't signed.

What this means is that today, the unsigned piece of code is a simple "Hello World" app; next week, that piece of code could be a kernel and memory dumper which would dump contents of the RAM through the serial port. Once the hackers have a good look at the innards of the processes, it becomes much more easier to pin-point vulnerabilities.

While I won't go around speculating about the future, it does hold a lot of importance since it's probably the only place where hackers are sure to get quick results. The released proof-of-concept is only for experienced users who know their way around a 360. You'll need to compile the code since it's open source, then you'll have to get a serial connection going between the 360 and your PC - quite a difficult task.

You'll still need one of the older kernels to run the POC since the latest kernel (4552) has this vulnerability patched. With no way to downgrade yet, it's up to the few lucky people with older kernels to try and make the most of this. Apart from that, you'll have to have a hacked DVD drive so that you can run a modified version of the King Kong game with the hacked shaders.

We've attached the POC if anyone's curious. Hack away! Remember to read the README file for instructions.

Download: crawler360's Hello World POC for the 360

 If there was a race as to which console get an exploit first, the Xbox 360 now gets the dubious honor of having the first publically available exploit usable by anyone who manages to jump all the hurdles while creating a proof-of-concept.

In case people don't know, the 360 has a hypervisor which basically keeps all the running software in check, making sure that it's all signed. If you're Microsoft, one of the biggest advantages of a hypervisor is that it doesn't allow hackers to use buffer overflows for exploits.

These buffer overflows have been the bane for Sony on the PSP. Anyone who owns a PSP would know that practically all the exploits have been using a buffer overflow to get their unsigned code to run.

What it does, and what you need to know after the jump!

 

While the PSP homebrew scene prides itself on being a huge multi-cultured community of people from all over the globe, the big majority of people who own a PSP have never tried out homebrew. Funny as it may sound, it is a fact that the homebrew community is nothing more than a niche area which generally doesn't receive much mainstream coverage apart from dedicated PSP homebrew sites.

Because of that very reason, we were pleasantly surprised to find a very nice article over at BBC covering the PSP homebrew scene. Now we'll be frank here. Generally, when any mainstream site/news agency decides to cover the homebrew scene, we tend to read it for entertainment purposes because reporters generally don't know what they're talking about. Either that, or they only have statements from the big corporations which means that their "research" is generally biased toward the bigwigs. This is precisely the reason why we found this article a pleasant surprise.

Now rather than trying to describe the article itself, we'll quote parts of it here:

Fanjita - real name David Court - is very different from the popular hacker stereotype of the socially inept teenaged geek working all night in his bedroom. A married man of 34, he is an accomplished professional programmer who writes server software for large telecommunications companies for a living. He spends an hour or two a night hacking PSP software in his Edinburgh home, and is also a martial arts enthusiast.

Dark Alex fits much more comfortably into the hacker mould. A student from Spain, his hacker moniker derives from his real name, Alejandro, and a liking for all things gothic, he says. His interests are Japanese Manga comics and cats, but PSP hacking is his main hobby.

The article is actually peppered around with statements from Fanjita and Dark_AleX, the two people who're the faces of the PSP homebrew scene right now. That reason alone is enough to force any homebrew lover to go over and check it out.

Thanks to Reggie for the heads up!

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Update: This morning at 07:50 GMT, the BBC World Service Radio had a chance to talk with Fanjita over the phone. The interview was telecast live on radio and the internet. At the bottom, we've linked the file so you can download it as an MP3. If you want to listen to the original stream, you can do so from the linked page.

Download: Fanjita's interview by the BBC (audio)