Some Progress
After some eMailing to the xbox-linux mailing list with no success in finding a cure for the Xbox not booting automatically from the hard drive, I discovered that the Cromwell BIOS I was running was somewhat out of date. Flashing the latest (2.32) fixed the issue, and the unit now powers up and boots itself properly. The xbox-linux guys are a friendly and supportive group, I look forward to contributing to the project.

Another good discovery was that with Cromwell, as opposed to the Microsoft firmware, any arbitrary ATAPI CD-ROM drive can be used. This is good, because the built-in optical drive was causing no end of problems reading burned media. The flipside to this is that now that the unit boots properly, the usefulness of the optical drive is much lower. But it is still good to know.

The progress report for this project is due fairly soon. Now that the system is fully running, it would be good to start transcribing ideas about how the user interface should work in time to write about it. Then, the Christmas Break can be used to start implementing these things. Also, over the exam period, it would be good to start looking for important components like the touchscreen and the GPS unit.