Levendis47 writes "CNET's News.com is running an article on Microsoft's legal manuevers which have successfully shut down the Lik Sang ecomm store where they've been selling various game system mod chips including the OpenXBox Mod Chip. This leads me to two questions (and I'll admit my ignorance, faux or not, in order to get discussion on this topic): 1) When a customer purchases an XBox (or any game system for that matter) are you intrinsically "signing" an end-user agreement in the purchase that makes modding the device illegal? 2) Could a non-profit org setup an effort to have mod chips produced and "distributed" at the cost of production w/o legal repurcussions? (i.e. would not making a profit on XBox's hardware mods protect you from their wrath?) 3) I understand the whole DRM aspect of mod'ing for playing copied games, BUT, what about legit gray-hacks like the Mandrake Linux XBox project and such? It would seem to me that in the long haul, Microsoft would support such efforts because they could sell more devices (and potentially more software if they licensed an opensource validation library)... "

An anonymous reader writes "Today the Xbox Linux Project announced that Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 has been released. This is the first complete Linux distribution for the Microsoft Xbox gaming console. A 350 MB installation CD of Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 is available for download free of charge from the Xbox Linux website."

RJV asks: "I currently have a rather large digital music collection. It is all in mp3 or ogg format and it is all from CDs that I personally own or have borrowed from friends. I have built a rather cheap mp3 server to store all of the music on and I listen to it on my machines rather easily. However, I'm looking for a better solution for accessing and playing from the archive in my living room. I currently have a linux box that uses the TV as a monitor. I can use it fine to play mp3/ogg files through the home theater, but mostly because I know where the buttons are in xmms. (640x480 isn't the best resolution for xmms). I've looked into multiple other projects, such as Aurian Music Manager and Freevo (the computer also has a TV in card) but have not been satisfied with their performance and/or ease of use, especially when trying to use my Universal Remote Control. So, I've decided that perhaps the best course of action for the living room is to purchase a stand-alone component that will integrate with my current system. What are my options and are there any experiences within the community with these products?"

An anonymous reader writes "Just submitted on the XBox developers list, a new Xbox game (iso) is available. 'The battle for world dominance is raging. And now, you can play the game on your xbox(tm). Choose alliance with either Tux or Clippy, and finish the mother of all disputes right here and right now. This game is free (as in beer), and will run on any xbox that has been modified for use with the GNU/Linux operating system. The game runs on top of xbox-linux from Sourceforge's xbox-linux project.' The game features include: Industry heroes like CLIPPY, TUX, BIL, STV, RMS, LNS; Battle cries, each unique to the in-game characters, ranging from "Developers! Developers! Developers!" to "GNU!"; Anti aliased alpha-transparency graphics; Explosions." I have no idea if they're serious, and it doesn't matter.

scphantm asks: "I have the wonderful (and rare) job of building a development department from scratch. One of the things im doing right now is looking for the software im going to use company wide to manage the department and the various projects we are going to have. I have some great ideas for OSS project management software, but the one piece of the puzzle that im missing is a good requirements management system. I have found a few that will do what i want but i have serious issues spending $1200 to $10,000 a seat! I sat down and put together a wish list for what I would want in a Requirements Management System, is there anything like this out there?" While SourceForge and it's free counterpart Alexandria may have a few of the pieces to his wishlist, scphantm has some decent ideas that Project Managers might want to think about.

MBCook writes "Everybody's favorite Xbox hackers have got Linux running for roughly six weeks, and now it runs well enough to announce that Windows has been run inside Linux with common PC virtualization software. They even have a little video of it playing a MPEG 4 of The Matrix fullscreen!"

davidwboswell writes "Oreillynet is running an article about how to create your own browser with Mozilla. This is a follow-up to a previous article that surveyed many of the alternate Mozilla browsers currently available including Chimera, Galeon, Phoenix and Aphrodite."

SpinDoctor writes "Looking across the XML bookshelf today, it's easy to see many books discussing XML in a generic manner, or more commonly how to utilize XML within Java, .NET and Perl. Moreover, despite the broad based support that PHP has for XML, there has been no book that tackled the complexities and best practices, and at the same time offered a comprehensive resource to the XML-based APIs -- at least not until now. Read on for more about the best selling Professional PHP4 XML." Read on for the complete review.

fader writes "Following in the footsteps of fast (and often fantastic) wrappers around Gecko (the Mozilla rendering engine), Mozilla has just released their own lightweight browser, Phoenix. Only Phoenix will still use XUL, the cross-platform markup language used for the current Mozilla interface. Will it still be fast enough to overcome the final gripe about Mozilla, namely that it's just too slow?"

willo asks: "I recently built an on board computer for my Grand Cherokee. The initial uses for it include music, gps navigation, on board diagnostics and a baby cam so I can see how my kid is in that rear facing seat. After lots of research and testing, I'm really disappointed with the mapping software out there for Linux. Gpsdrive provides the basic functionality I need, but the street names are built into the image and are difficult to read at a glance while driving. Not to mention that it has to download the maps it needs ahead of time. Xastir can handle almost any map out there, but it reads through every map for each redraw! It also seems to lack the ability to zoom intelligently based on location. Note that it's not really designed to be a navigation aid, but rather a ham radio APRS tool. (I am a ham). Delorme Street Atlas USA does what I really want, but it's been a pain to make run properly under wine. Is anyone else out there working on a decent navigation application?"

sidesh0w writes "Today the folks from Gaim released an alpha version of their Instant Messenger client for Win32." Gaim is the only IM client I've ever used; I still don't like IM, but Gaim is one sweet program.

An anonymous reader writes "With little fanfare, User Mode-Linux (UML) has been merged into Linus' BitKeeper tree. The merge followed a patch by UML author Jeff Dike, resynching UML with the 2.5.34 development kernel. From the UML homepage, User-Mode Linux provides you with a virtual machine that offers 'a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes. Run buggy software, experiment with new Linux kernels or distributions, and poke around in the internals of Linux, all without risking your main Linux setup.'" There's more UML resources available at the community site.

Slashback tonight with news of the Farscape backlash, an explanation for the slight shipping delay on your hypothetical new Human Transporter, an amusing chapter in the long and boring Nigerian spam book (check out the passport), and some tips on getting Linux on an Xbox. Enjoy! Update: 09/13 00:34 GMT by T : And a late add as well below with some important information for anyone intrigued by yesterday's mention of discarded AT&T microwave towers for sale.

handsomepete writes "According to PlanetXbox, Microsoft is looking to hire 'software design engineers' to look into the properties of modchips and detection code for hardware. A background in game hacking knowledge is listed as a preferred talent. Will any of the Xbox Linux participants take a stab at this job?"

killmenow writes "Following up this slashdot story from a few days ago, today The Register is reporting that the XBox Linux folks have released a HOWTO for getting SuSE 8.0 running. Cool...I may have to go buy an X-Box now." There's also a HOWTO for Debian if that's your style. All of these require an XBox with modified hardware... There's also a story about the XBox online gaming service that implies Microsoft will be scanning your machine to make sure you haven't modified it, but we can't link to it since silicon.com has some sort of stupid registration requirement. Anyone find the story elsewhere? Ah, News.com has a story about XBox Live.

A reader writes: "Some folks from The Boston Consulting Group with OSDN have been working on creating a visual representation of the Linux Kernel. It's been put online, complete with instructions with how to read it, and how to make sense of the information." There's also some new code checked into the Free Code Graphing Project, which enabled this to project to come together (look at CVS) - let's see if we can get people to do it with things like *BSD, Apache and some of the other great projects out there. This is a continuation with the other work being done, like the OSS demographic work. (Note: Slashdot is part of OSDN.)

freax writes "Today in the the xbox-linux mailinglist: I'm typing this into KMail using a USB keybaord (and a USB mouse) in front of the TV connected to the Xbox. ... and even StarOffice works quite fine. TuxRacer also runs (look at the new screenhots on the website), but only with one frame per second. Check out screenshots here."

Rob McKeever writes "I have just posted WirelessDriver 1.0.0b5.1 to both my iDisk (robm) and to the usual spot on SourceForge.net. This build has been compiled specifically for Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and will not work on earlier versions of Mac OS X. There will be a separate version coming shortly to fill this void. The installer will fail the first time you try to do this; please try to run the installer at least once more before asking for assistance." Wonderful! The panic-on-reinsertion bug appears to be fixed too, making it much more useful, as I only need to use the PC Card when the internal card is out of range. Also, SharePoints, for making arbitrary folders available via file sharing, was updated for 10.2 compatability. LiteSwitch X still isn't updated, but note that hot keys other than cmd-tab still work with the older version.

Slashback's blizzard of updates, corrections and amplifications includes some more information about Win2K and HIPAA, another notch on the Browser Progress Chart, Dreamcast ethernet jacks, the Hoopla'd Red Hat Menace and more. Read on.

jko9 writes "First proposed almost 20 years ago by Donald Knuth, the idea of Literate Programming is basically that of making program documentation primary, and embedding code in the documentation, rather than vice versa. Despite some obvious advantages apparent to anyone who has struggled to understand a poorly documented program, literate programming never really caught on. That all could change, however, with the release of a new program called Leo, written by Edward K. Ream. Leo supports standard literate programming languages like noweb and CWEB, but with a crucial difference - Leo adds outlines. The effect is striking: overall organization of a program is always visible and explicit. Much of the narrative of the documentation gets placed in the outline, making documentation simpler, and allowing viewers to approach the code at various levels of detail. Screenshots and tutorials for Leo are here - if that site gets slashdotted, you can download the visual tutorials in .chm form or html form from Leo's Sourceforge site. Leo is an open source program written in Python. Any current practioners of Literate Programming techniques out there? People who have tried it and given it up? Can the addition of outlines to Literate Programming make it more powerful / popular?"