Arch Linux

JonimusPrime

Member

Registered: 2009-04-23

Posts: 13

Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

SOme of you may have noticed a new article on the Wiki Titled Wii tutorial well thanks to the work of the fine people over at http://www.gc-linux.org and other Wii GNU/Linux Coders, and of course the Wii Homebrew Devs I present you Arch Linux the Wii.

Those are the first Images of Xorg runing in the Arch Linux enviroment on the Wii.

For those of you interested in helping the cause or just trying it out for yourselves check out the Wii tutorial page on the Wiki and http://www.gc-linux.org/

EDIT: Thanks to zc00gii for not being as lazy as me and makeing the wiki page.

Last edited by JonimusPrime (2009-06-13 02:26:27)

hatten

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Sweden, Borlange

Registered: 2009-02-23

Posts: 736

Re: Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

wow, cool! That's something i could try if i get bored!

ise

Developer

From: Karlsruhe / Germany

Registered: 2005-10-06

Posts: 404

Website

Re: Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

This could become really interesting.

What about the original OS on the Wii, will it be deleted/override by the install process of gc-linux/bootmii or does it extend it and I can boot both?
Does all software from the PPC repository works on the Wii?
What about the resolution of the xorg driver, make it sense to run it on a huge LCD? I have seen that the example xorg.conf has 640x576 as resolution. That's not really much.

I hope you can give some information on that, because that's really interesting and should become more popular.

Daniel

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JonimusPrime

Member

Registered: 2009-04-23

Posts: 13

Re: Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

Arch Linux or any otehr distro for that matter can be run from either the SD card, USB drive or NFS share. The gamecube must run from a NFS share as it doesn't have the SD slot or USB ports. The prebuilt kernels are set up for SD card but a hex editor can fix that easily.

The resolution is limited by the graphics hardware and cannot be changed. The xorg driver is currently no more than a glorified framebuffer but one that has real accleration is in the works. 

Bootmii was devloped by the Wii homebrew community so that applications can hove complete access to all of the hardware rather than haveing to go thorugh Nintendo's IOS system which was poorly written. Bootmii is similar to a lilo like boot loader that replaces Nintendo's Boot2. if there is no SD card inserted it just hands control over to nintendos boot2 and everything goes as usual. If there is an SD card inserted it Loads the files to be run on the Arm core and the PPC core. (If you didn't know the wii has two processors an arm the ainterfaces most of the hardware and a PPC core that runs the games and can access the grpahics hardware.) In the case of Wii linux teh arm core gets a custom IOS named 'mini' and the ppc gets the kernel. 

For more information you can check out Bootmii.org, gc-linuc.org, and wiibrew.org. Those are three of the main Wii homebrew/Wii linux sites.

Last edited by JonimusPrime (2009-06-17 16:21:35)

zc00gii

Member

Registered: 2009-06-13

Posts: 5

Re: Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

ise: most of the software, if not all, on the PowerPC repositories should work, but the PowerPC processor built for the Wii is stripped down some, then you would find in, for example, a PowerPC Mac

Also, I've made a YouTube  video recently of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hUSkOLWMZ8

Last edited by zc00gii (2009-06-17 17:45:05)

JonimusPrime

Member

Registered: 2009-04-23

Posts: 13

Re: Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

Nice work on the video zc00gii.

The main difference with the Wii's power pc proc is that it is missing an instruction set that is crucial for decoding the h264 video codec so none of the media players will be able to play videos encoded as such but almost all other things work and the proc is fairly speedy and arch linux seems much more responsive than the Debian file system tarballs that others have prepared. That video is a good demonstration and if anyone wants any help they can join the #wiilinux channel on efnet and if me or zc00gii are on we'll gladly help you out along with any other wiilinux enthusiasts.

elstupidos

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Santa Barbara, CA

Registered: 2008-01-14

Posts: 43

Re: Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajW2fDy41fY

couldnt help but think of this

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Ghost1227

Forum Fellow

From: Omaha, NE, USA

Registered: 2008-04-21

Posts: 1,422

Website

Re: Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajW2fDy41fY

couldnt help but think of this

I love it!!!

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Maki

Member

From: Skopje, Macedonia

Registered: 2007-10-16

Posts: 353

Website

Re: Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

Great work, kudos

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zc00gii

Member

Registered: 2009-06-13

Posts: 5

Re: Arch Linux PPC on the Nintendo Wii

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajW2fDy41fY

couldnt help but think of this

HAHA, nice

Well, we may release a minimal install tarball or loopback image soon, thanks for the support!