[PD] pd on xbox-linux

[Johannes Taelman]

Hi!

The folks at xbox-linux.sourceforge.net hacked the microsoft xbox and made
a linux installer for it. I thought it could be a nice box for running pd
in installations and performances since it is small, cheap (250EUR),
reasonable performance (733MHz PIII, 64MB ram), and a basic but usefull
set of interfaces (4xUSB, 100baseTX ethernet, stereo sound output,
composite video output) and storage (10GB HD, dvd-rom). I went ahead and
bought an xbox, and installed a modchip. Installation went smooth, and pd
seems to run fine "out-of-the-box", but I haven't stressed or used it a
lot so far.

The downsides (for installation and performance applications):
* the usb-ports are not of any standard shape (but with some tooling and
glueing I replaced the connectors with regular USB ones).
* the 3d/opengl acceleration of the geforce3-mutant inside is not
available (not good for GEM)
* no sound input (solvable via an usb-audio device)
* fan noise (more than my desktop PC)
* it does not read CDR's (I had immediate success with a CDRW), but
the mutated dvd-reader can be replaced with some extra modifications.

So far it looks perfectly usable, but not as your main patch development
machine.

 j#|@