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!

Earlier this week, LTE Studios released version 2.2 of their LTE Game Engine program. The LTE Game Engine is a full-featured game engine that allows PSP users to program games or applications without having to fight any of the pspsdk calls. You don't even need to know how the PSP system works to create games with LTE Game Engine. The engine manages input/output, 2d and 3d hardware accelerated graphics and audio.

Here are a few short how-tos from the readme file as well as the changelog:

Requirements
To use the LTE Game Engine you must have Toolchains installed, if you are running under win32 you can find the downloadable compiled version here:

http://xorloser.com/PS2DevWin32.zip

PSPGL is included in this archive, you need to use this version of PSPGL because I've fixed some bugs in it.

If you have any questions or encounter any problems, click on the 'via' link below to check out the LTE Studios website. There's a whole lot of info that can help you in their forums. Kudos to Soulkiller for the heads up.

To see the changelog and instructions, click on the "Full Article" link below.

Download: [LTE Game Engine 2.2]

Developer, xorloser, created an installable PSPDev environment for Win32. According to the good developer, this was done "using the latest toolchain script and pspsdk available at that time. This contains all you need to start developing for psp on a windows machine, presented in a nice, easy to use, installable format."

It contains the latest pspdev compiler and tools built on the GCC v4.0.2 toolchain and patches. It also contains the current (direct from svn) version of pspsdk precompiled. xorloser would just like to remind those who will be getting this that when installing, DO NOT install to a directory path that contains spaces! He also wants to extend his thanks to all those who helped make the toolchain and pspsdk what it is today.

Changelog:
* uname now returns the correct system type (windows) for scripted stuff
* rm.exe now deletes files using wildcards
* rmdir.exe has been copied to cyg-rmdir.exe (to resolve dos rmdir command conflicts)
* mkdir.exe has been copied to cyg-mkdir.exe (to resolve dos mkdir command conflicts)
* echo.exe has been copied to cyg-echo.exe (to resolve dos echo command conflicts)

Download: [PSPDev for Win32]