Hacking Linux help, please?

[Maxternal]

Well, process is this:
1. I PM you the stuff.
2. Extract it onto your SD card
3. With a WAD manager (not included), install the included WAD file onto your vWii. This will install the BootMii IOS onto your vWii. (this is the potentially dangerous part.)
4. (optional) leave vWii and go back in to make sure it's not "bricked".
5. In HBC, press the home button and tell it to launch BootMii.
6. This will use the BootMii IOS to load and run the armboot.bin and ppcboot.elf files from the /bootmii folder on the SD card.
7. Note what happens on the screen* (this is the old, normal, armboot.bin)
8. Restart (may need to unplug and plug back in).
9. On the SD card, Swap the /armboot.bin (my mod) in the root of the SD card with the one in the /bootmii folder.
10. Launch BootMii through HBC again and note what happens*.
11. At this point you will have successfully proven whether ... Or not ... This method can be used to run custom code on the ARM processor int the Wii U from Wii mode.

* mostly you are just seeing if the bootmii menu comes up or not. On a normal wii you would use either the GC controller (which is not present on a Wii U) or the power and reset buttons to switch and select menu options respectively. Since the Wii U only has a power button you still can't fully navegate the menus but you might as well test to see if the power button still works while you're at it. Wiimotes will not sync and that is normal.

 

[Ninja_Carver]

djbubba? you going to be our first tester?

 

[Ninja_Carver]

also, please send WAD

 

[Maxternal]

also, please send WAD

Just sent it to djbubba2002. Once he confirms it's okay, I can start PM'ing to other interested testers. (I want to limit casualties here.)

 

[djbubba2002]

Wish ME Lucky........Wiiu Test One if this one goes bad i got two more to test...

 

[Ninja_Carver]

Wish ME Lucky........Wiiu Test One if this one goes bad i got two more to test...

good luck, good sir.

 

[hellboy2010]

Am in for the testing.
Could you send me the wad, thanks

 

[Ninja_Carver]

brick #1 or?

 

[Ray Lewis]

brick #1 or?

Wondering the same thing, LOL, bubba has not been back to report so he either has not, or is in shock at the sparks and smoke (joking).

 

[the_randomizer]

I think I was misunderstood. Let's assume our testers already have HBC installed on their vWii, and document steps to be taken for testing from that base.

Ah, no worries, I gathered that from your post. No sweat.

 

[Maxternal]

Okay, looks like it went okay. (I was finally able to get back to the computer and saw that he had PM'ed me about 15 minutes ago.)

Any one else want to test (kind of just to double check) just PM me.

EDIT : and just to be clear, by "went okay" I mean that installing the BootMii IOS didn't brick anything but running BootMii doesn't seem to do anything (just shows a black screen) and have to reset it.

 

[Ninja_Carver]

hes got more than one right? why not test another if that one went well?

 

[Maxternal]

hes got more than one right? why not test another if that one went well?

There's a few others that have tested and reported the same results (which are "okay" results and not completely "good" results yet running BootMii itself

If you wanted to start trying Linux versions (with one core) and see if you get anything better off of Linux than off of BootMii, be my guest. On WiiBrew ( http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Linux ) there are both versions that you could run with the BootMii IOS I sent you and more limited versions you can run right out of HBC. It'd be interesting to see what they actually do from vWii.

 

[Ray Lewis]

Running out of things to put in here when editing!!

 

[Ninja_Carver]

I got about an hour to dick with this well see what happens.

 

[Ray Lewis]

Not applicable

 

[Ray Lewis]

Epic fail

 

[Ninja_Carver]

Good Morning. Let us review something here,

No one bricked, which is good, makes me feel better about further testing.

Issue #1 occurred when could not load .WAD file provided in archive. (got the same error you did Ray, "(Ticket #-1017)" or something like that.

Forget how I resolved, but I think by loading IOS 236? (Description had "full homebrew support" in it).

The other IOS mentioned as possibly required, maybe 249? caused my vWii to lock, Wiimote powered down, could no longer sync, had to hard reset console.

Finally, Wad installed successful.

Running BootMii from start menu in HBC resulted in black screen from both original, and modified armboot.bin's.

That said,

BootMii is comprised by four pieces of software:

• Installer -- This is a simple ELF file which may be run using your favorite method (HBC, Twilight Hack, or any other exploit which can load standard executables). It checks your Wii to make sure it can safely be modified, saves some vital data for disaster recovery, and installs the rest of the components.
• Loader stub -- This is a small bit of ARM code which is injected into boot2, replacing Nintendo's internal ELF loader. When run, it looks to see if an SD card is inserted. If so, it tries to load and execute /bootmii/armboot.bin instead of boot2. Otherwise, it will fall back to loading boot2.
• mini -- This is a rudimentary replacement for IOS that is best suited for low-level recovery functions. Source code is available under GPLv2 here.
• BootMii (or bootmii-ppc) -- When mini runs, it looks for a file named /bootmii/ppcboot.elf on the SD card. If it exists, mini loads this executable into memory, boots up the Broadway (ppc) and executes that binary in parallel with mini. Source code is available under GPLv2 at (tbd).

Both mini and bootmii-ppc must be present in order to draw a user interface, because the Starlet cannot directly access the Video Interface.

Installer - HBC, right? I used WAD manager to load your WAD.
Loader stub - Modified armboot.bin?
mini - your provided IOS 254?, which by the way is relatively small in file size compared to others I had on my card.
BootMii or bootmii-ppc - As far as I know we made no modifications to this, so why would anything load?

Apparently both mini and bootmii-ppc must be present in order to draw the GUI. I didn't see any reference to ppcboot.elf in your archive? Was this modified at all? Or this is the part where we load the linux kernel in to it?

 

[Ninja_Carver]

Also Maxternal, the armboot.bin that you included in your archive, is that the one I compiled? if so, maybe try compiling on your machine, see if we end up with the same binary, maybe some libraries i used are different than yours.

 

[Ninja_Carver]

Yes, and Ninja had Ubuntu in mind. Which version Ninja? Maybe time to get it picked and linked so everyone can look at it and look at installing it. Guessing other versions could be used as template; can Ubuntu be ran from the bootmii idea with some tweaking? Lol, what goes where. I also saw you could change it so Linux looms at a USB drive (like a thumb drive) instead of SD card. I have 16 gig SD drive but only 2 GB SD card. Just thoughts.

Another thought is if drivers for what we need (PpC/SMP also) could be added to a build that already runs from bootmii. Penguinppc and Ubuntu seemed like best options. Ubuntu is updated and can easily add packages to it.

This works on a PC/Mac because the BIOS can be configured to look there for the boot record.
However on the wii, we have IOS, which needs to be modded to look there. Don't know where Max is at with this or if he's even gotten that far.