Owners of an Xbox don't necessarily need to wait until the November launch of Microsoft's Xbox Live to get their console online.
With a modification chip and a little technical ingenuity, the Xbox can now act as a simple Web server running on the Linux operating system.
This feat is made possible by a loosely organized group of programmers centered in Europe, who have created a version of the Linux core, or kernel, that can load on the Xbox hardware. The Xbox Linux Project, as it is called, draws on the fact that the Xbox is based on industry-standard PC hardware, and in fact plans to turn the machine into a fully functional PC--albeit one that only costs $200.
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