Well I think I am pretty sure which route I will take to modding my xbox when it arrives (hopefully Friday or Saturday!)... Now I am wondering, which dashboard should I use?

I only intend to use my xbox to 1) Play games. 2) Play video & audio.

I have read that xbmc is definately the way to go for playing audio and video, I just want to be able to listen to my mp3 collection on my living room stereo system, and watch divx movies and tv shows. I read xbmc can play audio or video from the xbox hard drive, or from a SMB share (which is perfect for me, since I have a SMB share on my linux server which holds my movie and mp3 collections).

However, can I make it so my xbox boots directly to xbmc when powered up (without a game disk), and if so, can it play game backups from SMB shares as well? Does it have a game launcher for backups (either on the hard drive or an SMB share)?

Yes it is possible to 1st load XBMC off of the HDD without the help of a disk.

To sum up the whole "games over SMB" thing, the only games that can be played over SAMBA/SMB are the games running on an emulator that supports SMB.
XBOX GAMES CANNOT BE PLAYED OVER SMB!
The reason is kind of simple, your xbox can only run 1 executable at a time. One game/program/emulator/xbmc/whatever at a time. Say you use XBMC to try to launch the xbox game, the executable (XBMC) that supports SAMBA would stop, thus the game loads no more.

Seemed like that explaination was going to be alot more easy than that.
Hope it makes sense to you.

- Illumi.Naughty

if you softmod install unleashx cuz it has a file explorer (evo x dosent) and get xbmc from the usual places (#xbins) and ftp it over to your box after that un rar it and look at some tuts on how 2 make it your dash. dont forget to get the MC360 skin
http://blackbolt.x-scene.com/index.php?p=s...c&cat=mc360

xbmc is the best media streaming dash but i like unleash x overall.

Makes perfect sense, thanks a bunch.

I am probably overcomplicating the process, and once the xbox arrives and I get some hands on with it I am sure I will be surprised how much easier it was than I thought it would be.

I've been using Linux for 10 years now, and building PCs for 14+ years, I doubt modding an xbox could be much more difficult.

This also brings up another good question, I've found lots of good tools for Windows for xbox modding, is there anything out there as far as Linux is concerned?

Are the windows tools superior to the Linux tools out there? (I have both Windows and Linux machines, so either is fine).

There is a tool "XboxHDM" that is a linux distribution specially formulated for making xbox HDD's.
I think most tools are available to windows, a few for mac, and next to none for linux. Probably a wise choice too because if most xbox tools were linux based I could only imagine how flooded these forums would be.