Homebrew Wii U Linux

[depaul]

It would be interesting to try some emulators to see how's the performance : NES, SNES, PCSX!

 

[M7L7NK7]

Any developments on this?

 

[lordelan]

Any developments on this?

It's still being worked on:
https://gitlab.com/linux-wiiu/linux-wiiu#wii-u-linux
Last activity is 2 weeks old though.

 

[Joom]

As it stands, we've got:

Framebuffer graphics (no acceleration or DRI)

Is it safe to assume wireless networking isn't a thing, though? I want WeeUChat. :^}

Also, don't hold your breath for emulators if this is all it can do now.

 

[CompuCat]

Hey all, here's a quick update on the state of things. I haven't been able to work much on linux-wiiu due to real life (and that's likely true for the other devs too), but Quark and I have been working on a better solution for installing Debian than finagling around with tarballs and images and all that *fun* stuff. I'm currently cleaning up the Linux side of things right now (chroot is a royal pain), and Quark's been off bug hunting in linux-loader to implement support for a few bootloader features necessary for a clean installer. (They're not features you'll see on the surface, so don't worry if nothing seems to look different.)

@depaul: regarding emulators, go ahead! I've actually been thinking about trying a few myself. GCC is throwing internal compiler errors everywhere, though, so compiling anything non-trivial from scratch is mildly annoying at best and awful at worst. Anything needing a recompiler is probably a no-go unless someone's written one for PPC, so PSX and N64 are probably out for now. You could give NES/SNES a shot...

@Joom: sadly no wireless yet. rw's the one mainly working on this; I'm not in the loop about how it's going right now. Use a USB-Ethernet adapter for now.

 

[Joom]

@Joom: sadly no wireless yet. rw's the one mainly working on this; I'm not in the loop about how it's going right now. Use a USB-Ethernet adapter for now.

That works? I only skimmed over what was functional, and I thought I saw that USB peripherals don't work yet. Guess I read wrong.

 

[Gunstorm]

Hey all, here's a quick update on the state of things. I haven't been able to work much on linux-wiiu due to real life (and that's likely true for the other devs too), but Quark and I have been working on a better solution for installing Debian than finagling around with tarballs and images and all that *fun* stuff. I'm currently cleaning up the Linux side of things right now (chroot is a royal pain), and Quark's been off bug hunting in linux-loader to implement support for a few bootloader features necessary for a clean installer. (They're not features you'll see on the surface, so don't worry if nothing seems to look different.)

@depaul: regarding emulators, go ahead! I've actually been thinking about trying a few myself. GCC is throwing internal compiler errors everywhere, though, so compiling anything non-trivial from scratch is mildly annoying at best and awful at worst. Anything needing a recompiler is probably a no-go unless someone's written one for PPC, so PSX and N64 are probably out for now. You could give NES/SNES a shot...

@Joom: sadly no wireless yet. rw's the one mainly working on this; I'm not in the loop about how it's going right now. Use a USB-Ethernet adapter for now.

thanks a lot for update us with the status of the work in progress

 

[CompuCat]

@Joom: we patched the kernel to have support for a bunch of different USB-Ethernet adapters a little while ago, update your kernel and give it a shot. It should work with most, but no guarantees.

 

[SG854]

What can I do with this?

 

[uyjulian]

What can I do with this?

Run Linux programs on your Wii U.
However, there's nothing useful to you that you can do right now using this.

 

[Gunstorm]

What can I do with this?

linux is "like a windows OS" but is an free and opensource Operational System

https://www.linux.com/what-is-linux






be fun

 

[lordelan]

Hey all, here's a quick update on the state of things. I haven't been able to work much on linux-wiiu due to real life (and that's likely true for the other devs too), but Quark and I have been working on a better solution for installing Debian than finagling around with tarballs and images and all that *fun* stuff. I'm currently cleaning up the Linux side of things right now (chroot is a royal pain), and Quark's been off bug hunting in linux-loader to implement support for a few bootloader features necessary for a clean installer. (They're not features you'll see on the surface, so don't worry if nothing seems to look different.)

@depaul: regarding emulators, go ahead! I've actually been thinking about trying a few myself. GCC is throwing internal compiler errors everywhere, though, so compiling anything non-trivial from scratch is mildly annoying at best and awful at worst. Anything needing a recompiler is probably a no-go unless someone's written one for PPC, so PSX and N64 are probably out for now. You could give NES/SNES a shot...

@Joom: sadly no wireless yet. rw's the one mainly working on this; I'm not in the loop about how it's going right now. Use a USB-Ethernet adapter for now.

Sounds good. Thanks for the update. It's great to hear that you're still "on it". It's completely fine that you don't "waste" all your time on it due to your real life. It should stay a fun thing so don't rush yourself.
I guess we're all happy whenever something new happens here. After all it's fun for us to to play around with it even if it can't do that much.

 

[M7L7NK7]

If it gets up and running fully, what things can you expect to do on it? There's youtube videos of linux running on the Wii and then running XP

 

[uyjulian]

If it gets up and running fully, what things can you expect to do on it? There's youtube videos of linux running on the Wii and then running XP

Run more programs than you can currently with Cafe OS homebrew

 

[lordelan]

If it gets up and running fully, what things can you expect to do on it? There's youtube videos of linux running on the Wii and then running XP

Especially a media player (finally!), a proper browser, some simple games, using the Wii U as a server for multiple things (although a Rasp would be the better choice) and so on.

 

[CompuCat]

I've already got Firefox running.....slowly

Both VLC and mplayer should work, but the compiled versions in the Debian repos will crash since they expect a newer PPC processor with AltiVec capabilities; the old PPC 750-based processor in the Wii U can't understand AltiVec instructions. You'll have to compile one of them on your own. GCC throws internal compiler errors when I try to compile VLC, though, so we'll see if we get anywhere on that.

Sidenote: bluetooth keyboards work with a bit of finagling. (I know, who cares, but somebody might want to know.)

 

[uyjulian]

TenFourFox support would be nice, but I think it's for Mac OS X 10.4/10.5 only.

Also, apparently, Debian dropped support for PowerPC since Stretch since its port was not being maintained.

Does the Wii U has a h264 hardware decoder?

 

[CompuCat]

Debian has dropped support for PPC in the main releases, but Debian's sid (unstable) branch still supports PPC. TenFourFox does have a G3 version, but it's (again) OS X only; Firefox works just fine, actually.

The Wii U does have an h264 hardware decoder; I'm pretty sure it's just the decoder built into the R700 GPU, but I'm not certain.

Also, @kfrfansub, here's your long-delayed demo of linux-wiiu. It's kind of long due to slow loading times and one stupid PEBKAC error. (if I sound sleepy, it's because I am...)

 

[kfrfansub]

Debian has dropped support for PPC in the main releases, but Debian's sid (unstable) branch still supports PPC. TenFourFox does have a G3 version, but it's (again) OS X only; Firefox works just fine, actually.

The Wii U does have an h264 hardware decoder; I'm pretty sure it's just the decoder built into the R700 GPU, but I'm not certain.

Also, @kfrfansub, here's your long-delayed demo of linux-wiiu. It's kind of long due to slow loading times and one stupid PEBKAC error. (if I sound sleepy, it's because I am...)

Thank you for the demo.

Good work ! And don't forget to sleep ^^

 

[CompuCat]

Haha, thanks

Just tried a NES emulator, too (FCEUX)...yikes. The Wii U has more than enough CPU horsepower for it, but our pixel-pushing fbdev implementation is punishingly slow. Depending on how large you scale the image and how much you wiggle the cursor around, I've seen the FPS dip to about 21 running Super Mario Bros.