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Homebrew Wii U Linux

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Linux ... is a bit of mystery to me ive heard of it over the years but never had nor seen it before .. i have a hacked wii u of course what can be done with this ? .. im interested to have a mess around with it ... but what does it do exactly ?!? .........
 
Linux is a full-blown operating system, similar to Windows or macOS. Basically, this (somewhat) turns your Wii U into a functional, general-purpose computer. There are some caveats (our driver support isn't great, etc). However, the base system is functional!
 
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CompuCat said:
Linux is a full-blown operating system, similar to Windows or macOS. Basically, this (somewhat) turns your Wii U into a functional, general-purpose computer. There are some caveats (our driver support isn't great, etc). However, the base system is functional!
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Hmmm sounds interesting indeed... What are the best things possible.. To use it for atm... I. E games.. Ect is it dangerous at all?
 
You can't run games on linux-wiiu right now. Even FCEUX barely manages 30FPS, as we don't have a fully-accelerated graphics driver. It shouldn't break anything on your console (with the exception of the wifi-fixes branch....we're still trying to figure out what the heck some of our changes actually do)
 
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@CompuCat I'm not sure where else I should post this, but I noticed whenever I boot up Linux, my Wii U forgets any controllers connected except the GamePad. So whenever I go to play games with either my Wii U Pro Controller or Wiimote, I have to resync it to the Wii U. Are you aware of this bug?
 
Hmmm....I haven't noticed that before. This happens with all controllers? Also, are you using Bluetooth at all in Linux?
 
CompuCat said:
Hmm, I'll definitely take a look into this. Thanks for the report!

(tagging @QuarkTheAwesome, thoughts?)
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I know Linux likes to try to load drivers for anything it can, so maybe while its trying to load a Bluetooth driver, it messes stuff up?
Since the Wii U likes to map every single device it can to memory, maybe the Bluetooth has some memory that gets overwritten by Linux?
I'm not 100% sure as I haven't actually checked any of this out myself, I've been pretty busy with the switch as of late :P
 
The Wii U's Bluetooth transceiver is simply a USB device. In my experience, pairing bindings are stored by the OS, not by the chipset.....hence why this is so bemusing.
 
I was checking some stuff out, and we might be able to start using Yocto Linux, it supports PPC and is really easy to customize, we might be able to get a rolling distribution going with it as well.
 
This is SO COOL!!! I am using Linux as my main OS now for almost 10 years and I knew that with the WiiU specs Linux would run great on it. Now I have an extra reason for taking the risk of modding my WiiU for homebrew...I did not have the guts for it yet. Nearly all my other consoles are modded already....:lol:

Would be cool to compile WiiU homebrew from Linux On the WiiU itself.

Edit: It would be even more awesome if eventually it might be possible to run the compiled homebrew in some kind of WiiU VM! ^_^
 
Last edited by Archerite,
Modding the Wii U isn't difficult; there are multiple guides to help you. Just make sure you know what you're doing before you do it.

In theory, compiling CafeOS homebrew from inside linux-wiiu would be possible; in practice, our toolchain (exjam's wut) depends on devkitPro at the moment, which doesn't distribute PPC binaries IIRC. However, anything that doesn't depend on devkitPro (such as the linux-wiiu kernel) compiles just fine.

Running CafeOS software inside linux-wiiu is an interesting thought...you'd essentially have to adapt the executable and library loader from something like decaf-emu to get it running, then carefully hook any CafeOS system calls to replicate their functionality in Linux. Anything that relies on more than one core will be slow at best (we've only got one core running for technical reasons), and anything requiring graphics functionality will have to wait until we replace the fbdev driver with proper hardware-accelerated graphics.
 
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