FreeBSD/xbox live/installcd's available

Hello everyone,

In order to aid people installing FreeBSD on their xbox, I have created
combined install/livecds to aid those willing to give FreeBSD/xbox a
try. The images can be used to boot a full multi-user FreeBSD
environment, but you can also boot directly into sysinstall to
install FreeBSD on your Xbox.

As I've recently merged Xbox support back to -STABLE, an ISO for
6-STABLE is also provided.

The images are hosted by MCGV Stack (http://www.stack.nl), and can be
retrieved from ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/freebsd-xbox/. A list of the files
and checksums is:

xbox-6stable-20060821.iso.bz2 - install/livecd for FreeBSD 6-STABLE
MD5    = 9afbab92bbb43a797753a941737ef0bb
SHA1   = 26908c6301484c133f23875a8136c2dbeb336e88
SHA256 = d67e51c2a37e14193a5cbfb49903899f60784e39f91888f8e0a48c85ee3eee46

xbox-7current-20060517.iso.bz2 - install/livecd for FreeBSD 7-CURRENT
MD5   = 82108c6112f8b39fb82e71fdc727704a
SHA1   = 83e40e292ac8ace395fcf199f1bb16b0a34531c5
SHA256 = 2176904283707273e7d62e31c516bc81c9a2021556bb84adbe23071ba9b8dd83

Some important points of attention:

(1) The loader used is Cromwell; the Cromwell version on the images has special
    patches which do not appear in any official releases build [1]. Therefore,
    if you already use Cromwell on your Xbox, please chain-load the Cromwell on
    the images beforing attempting to boot FreeBSD.

(2) 'patched' dashboard (the Xbox 'operating system') versions can directly
    boot the /DEFAULT.XBE file on the CDROM. The official Dashboard will
    fail to boot this, however, as the DEFAULT.XBE file is not signed
    with any Microsoft-approved key. Booting this file will directly
    start the FreeBSD-enabled Cromwell.

(3) There is no loader support. Any tunables must be set using kernel
    options (such as the root device to use)

(4) The xbox is very picky on the media used. If you get random panics
    or hangs during installation, try another brand of media.

(5) If you keep experiencing DMA errors or timeouts, please use a 80 pin
    UDMA IDE cable. As there is no loader support, there is no way to
    force ata(4) to use only UDMA2 modes.

(6) You currently need an USB keyboard; I'm planning to add
    dhclient(8) and sshd(8) automatic startup to the liveCD later.

Anyway, feel free to give this a try and report any problems back to me.
I intend to clean up the script used to build the ISO images in a short
while.

[1] Cromwell from xbox-linux.org CVS contains all patches required to be
    able to boot the recent FreeBSD kernels. However, it does not
    support direct booting from UFS partitions.

Regards,

-- 
Rink P.W. Springer                                - http://rink.nu
"When will the internet move from 64Kb max .com domains to .exe
 domains which can use much more memory?" - Edwin Groothuis