Last Wednesday I fiddled around a bit and managed to set up a spare desktop PC running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx to act as a Samba server, and thus act as a central point for my laptop and main desktop PC to access, and at the same time installed ushare in order to make the my other idea a reality – streaming all my media to the XBOX via a Linux machine! Of course, one of the steps involved in doing this was of course to hook the XBOX up on the network and after granting it a static IP (for easy identification) and enabling UPnP on the router, I now had an XBOX receiving all my media and more importantly, hooked up to the world.

Now as we all know XBOX Live comes with a free month long trial Gold account and so I dutifully signed up (in the sneaky fashion all of us South Africans currently have to follow) and opened the door to network gaming on my XBOX.

Of course though, this being a public holiday meant that I didn’t really get a chance to test drive it other than post a Twitter message via the console, send a friend invite out to Terrance (Merkaba ZA) and download updates for FIFA World Cup 2010 South Africa.

But that all changed yesterday when I grabbed a spare moment, spotted Terrance online and attempted to wave him down and join me for a quick FIFA game. Of course, this sound much easier than what it actually was, mainly because a) I first had to find my headset that came with the XBOX and 2) needed to figure out how to unmute it and turn it on – not particularly easy when you completely overlook the obvious switch button dangling right in front of you on the headset’s cable itself! :)

That said, get it working I did and after a bit of fumbling around trying to get Terrance to talk to me, we finally got connected and hit FIFA World Cup 2010 South Africa head first.

Terrance adopted his number 1 team, Italy, while I opted for the evenly matched Germans and we launched into our head-to-head game where it turned out neither one of us could gain an upper hand and so ended it on a nil nil standing! But, the deed was done, my XBOX Live virginity was now broken and I can now proudly stand tall as part of the online XBOX crowd!

And I won’t lie, I was impressed. I’m running a little unstable 384 kbs line here and not once did I have any hassle or lag with the audio to Terrance (even during the game) nor the actual game itself. It was absolutely perfect, tons of fun, and now leaves me in a position where I too need to begin urging my dear brother Ryan to join in the fun! ;)

So if you feel like hitting me up online, have a look for craiglotterZA. There’s not much to my name just yet, but give me time – I’ve just got started you know! :P