Please read the FAQ regarding xbox360 file format compatibility.  It may help you pick better options for your particular files than the general ones i offer below.

The solution is simple: Use Avidemux.

1. Install avidemux. To install it is simple. It’s in the Ubuntu repositories and I imagine you can also find it in other distros quite easily.
2. Open avidemux and open the mkv you want to convert. If prompted some garbage about 264 and safemode, just use safe mode and dont worry about it.
3. Select File -> Properties. This will tell you some info on the formats in use in your video file. Take this opportunity to identify what the xbox doesn’t like. When you are finished, click OK. If you want a second opinion, open up the folder with your mkv in it. Right click -> properties -> Audio/Video tab. This will also tell you the video and audio formats.
4. We obviously know that it wont play a video in a MKV container, so first thing to do is change the “Format” dropdown to say “MP4″ (you can, of course use AVI, but the majority of files I run into are h.264 and aac audio. For this combo, you want mp4…)
5. From the Properties menu, recall the video codec. H264 files show as “AVC1″ inside of avidemux. I’m sure theres a technical reason for this, but do you want to talk about it or watch your video?
   Most of the time, you can leave the video droptown in avidemux on “Copy” this is nice because it means that your processor wont be re-encoding the video. This saves you quality and time.
6. From the properties menu, recall the audio codec. If you have a video with AAC stereo audio, leave the dropdown on “copy”.
   This is where most of my files need some love. Many MKV’s have 5.1 surround audio tracks. This is great, but not for an xbox360. To mix the audio down to stereo, select AAC on the audio dropdown, then click “filters”. In the mixer dropdown, select “stereo”.
7. Click “save”. Avidemux will prompt you for a filename for the converted file. It does not default a file extension, so do yourself and your xbox a favor and add one yourself like “<videoname>.mp4″.

Once avidemux is finished with your file, it’s ready to go.

http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/

My issue is that when converting a folder full of videos, I don’t want to have to use the gui to add a bunch of videos to the queue one by one. It’s a very clicky process. This simple bash script will walk handbrake through all the files in a selected folder:

#!/bin/bash
for file in "$1"/*
do
	echo 'HandBrakeCLI -i "${file}" -o "${file}.mp4" --preset="iPhone & iPod Touch"""'
	HandBrakeCLI -i "${file}" -o "${file}.mp4" --preset="iPhone & iPod Touch"""
done

Save that into a .sh file like “handbrakefolder.sh”

Now you can simply execute this script against a folder containing your video files. like this:

hostname% ls Videos
Video1.avi
Video2.avi
Video3.avi
hostname% ./handbrakefolder.sh Videos
...
...
...
hostname% ls Videos
Video1.avi
Video1.avi.mp4
Video2.avi
Video2.avi.mp4
Video3.avi
Video3.avi.mp4

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

In Debian 4 (etch) it is in this file:

/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

To apply changes in Lenny: “udevadm trigger” or “udevtrigger” (in Etch)

1. Do a hard reset on the machine
2. When you arrive at the GDM screen, DO NOT CLICK ON ANYTHING.
3. press CTRL + ALT + F5. Your screen will switch over to a text console.
4. Log in.
5. Install the Nvidia glx driver

sudo aptitude install nvidia-glx-new

6. Reboot the machine.

sudo reboot

**Confirmed using Blackberry Tour (9630) on Verizon. **

What we will do is use a program called ‘barry’. http://www.netdirect.ca/software/packages/barry All we need to do is install some packages from the repository below. These commands are from the terminal, so launch it from “Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal” in the Menu.

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add these lines:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/doctormo/barry-snapshot/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/doctormo/barry-snapshot/ubuntu karmic main

install the repositories key.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 113659DF

Now update your package list

sudo aptitude update

and install the programs:

sudo aptitude install libbarry0 barry-util barrybackup-gui

Thats it! now to create the connection, the command will vary depending on your provider. The ones they have preconfigured are: ATT Cingular, China Mobile, KPN Nederland, O2 Ireland, Rogers, Sprint, T-Mobile US, Verizon.
the syntax is :
sudo pppd call barry-{provider}

for Verizon:

sudo pppd call barry-verizon

You’ll see a bunch of output, and it’ll tell you that the connection is up. to close it down, press (CTRL+C). Make it pretty by creating an application launcher on your desktop.

1. Get the packages installed.

apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-main

2.Follow the instructions here:  http://wiki.debian.org/Compiz to customize your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file

3. restart gdm

/etc/init.d/gdm restart

4. open up a terminal and type

compiz --replace

5. If a went well, you should see everything flash around as it redraws your desktop.

6. My window decorations (title bars) dissapeared when I enabled compiz. Additionally, i couldn’t drag windows by clicking on the title bar. To fix this: go to

a. System -> Preferences -> Compizconfig Settings Manager
b. Scroll down to the “Effects” section and enable “Window decoration”
c. Scroll down to “Window Management” and enable “Move Window”

7. If you want to use the desktop cube and/or workspaces, you will need more than the single or dual workspaces provided by default.

a. System -> Preferences -> Compizconfig Settings Manager
b. Click “General options”
c. Select the “Desktop size” tab.
d. Set the “Horizontal Virtual size” to whatever you want. For a cube… 4

8. If you want compiz to start automatically with GNOME:

Add “compiz –replace” to “Desktop -> Preferences -> Sessions -> Startup Programs”

This is a result of a zombie ‘vmware-vmx’ process running. All you need to do is kill the process. This command sends ‘signal 9′ to the process. When sent to a program, SIGKILL causes it to terminate immediately. In contrast to SIGTERM and SIGINT, this signal cannot be caught or ignored. For more information: more sigkill info.

killall -s9 vmware-vmx

After that, I was able to start up the virtual machine without issue.

aptitude install bwm-ng

Then, just type ‘bwm-ng’ in the command line. It will give you something like this:

bwm-ng v0.6 (probing every 5.000s), press 'h' for help
  input: /proc/net/dev type: rate
  -         iface                   Rx                   Tx                Total
  ==============================================================================
               lo:           0.00 KB/s            0.00 KB/s            0.00 KB/s
             eth0:        2221.47 KB/s           48.13 KB/s         2269.60 KB/s
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            total:        2221.47 KB/s           48.13 KB/s         2269.60 KB/s

Pressing the “h” key while it is running wil actually pull up a nice menu to change some of the options you are looking at.

bwm-ng is very basic, “iptraf” is another tool that provides some more functionality if you want to drill further into what is moving in and out of your box.