I was just thinking about reviews of Mandriva LE 2005 that I read right around the time of its release. There were references to the 10.2 distro having Xbox console support. Google for "mandriva xbox console", and you will find the old reviews I speak of. I have not read anything about it since, nor can I find any more info explaining.

Does this mean on my Mandriva installation I can go rent an xbox game and simply stick it in my dvd player and play it? I have no idea, I haven't played a game since Super Mario came out for the original playstation.

If anyone has any idea of what that hype was all about and if it is usable please let me know.

I doubt Mandriva would preinstall any sort of XBOX emulator on their system. That would be a law suit waiting to happen. If you want to play XBOX or PS2 games on your PC, you could probably find some freeware emulators out on the web. I believe the XBOX console support means that you can install Mandriva on an XBOX or connect a PC running Mandriva to an XBOX to back up your files.

It's going to be quite awhile before there is good emulation for current gaming systems. To play a playstation game you need close to a 1 GHz processor to play full speed, and the playstation only had a 33 MHz processor on board. I think it will be awhile before hardware has the ability to play XBox and PS2 games full speed.

Well why is this rpm avaliable? Also why would there be a lawsuit? You have to buy one of their machines in order to play their PC game? That is like Sony making DVD movies compatable only with their DVD player. Is that not illegal? And then in a few years XBOX will be absolete to and they will have a new box.

kernel-xbox-2.6.11.6mdk-1-1mdk.i586 : The version of the Linux kernel used on XBox machines. (to install)

I'd guess the package you are referring to is a kernel that can be installed on an XBox. You've been able to do this with fedora core for quite some time now, maybe mandrake is just catching on. Basically, the XBox can become a fully functional computer that is able to do just about everything a "real" computer can do once you install an operating system on it. Here is some info although I'm sure this isn't Mandrake they are talking about.

http://www.xbox-linux.org/

You can do some research into current generation console emulation and you'll realize that the emulation is barely past its infancy (they can get bits of some games to work, but it's buggy and slow). And this is for windows. Emulation progress has ALWAYS been behind on Linux (probably by about 6 months to a year). Currently you'd have a better chance of being able to play a nintendo game on an xbox than an xbox game on a computer (they've been working on that sort of stuff for awhile now).

Oh yeah, the lawsuit.

Microsoft and Sony DEFINITELY own the copyright for the software that is installed on their respective machines (the bios and embedded software). Any attempt to emulate these systems would require hacking this software. Some emulators get around this by requiring you to get a separate bios file, but this means that the program won't work until you download an illegal file. There may be a way to make a fully legal emulator (and many of the emulators for earlier systems WERE fully legal by themselves), but the distro would get nailed if they included an emulator most likely. Similar to Napster getting sued for software that allowed people to share music files.