I bought an xbox this past week for 2 reasons, one is because I LOVE Halo and some of the games for it are simply amazing. The 2nd reason I bought it was to put xbox linux (Mandrake 9.0) on it.

The modchip I have my sights set on is the X-ecutor 2 Lite from this site. From what i'm reading, you don't lose native DVD playback and there is actually a switch to shut the modchip off so as not to alarm Xbox Live.