Michael experiences the horrors of setting up WiFi on Linux 2.6 just like when it was still widely in use. Gosh, that was a nightmare back in the day but seeing Linux running on the Wii is pretty cool.
Gives me a lot of respect for the guy who set up all the networking, user permissions, DVD playback, etc, on all the Linux machines at my school during that era.
Very impressive! Linux is also available on the 3DS, although it's much more limited and difficult to use, due to the inability to plug in an external keyboard, meaning you have to use a tiny on screen keyboard on the touchscreen. There's not really any support for any desktop environments either. There's also Linux on the Wii U, and from what I've heard, you can apparently install a few different distros, including Lubuntu.
Depending on if there's been a release of 3DS Linux in the past few years, I wrote some of the code for that keyboard. :p It was neat but honestly less neat than Linux on the original DS, considering what was available as cheap handhelds at the different times. By the time 3DS Linux was out, you could get a cheap cellphone and do portable things on that way better, and the web had really passed it by in a lot of ways.. When the DS was big and Linux for that was out, it was actually a pretty powerful portable computer for the price for its time, and a lot of sites were still usable in the links browser.
A staple in this channel, when something is simple to do, stuff never goes right, a staple and classic in this channel and that's why I keep watching. Because it's actually pretty entertaining.
Well, I was on the fence of what to do with my extra wii, but this has kind of convinced me of my next rainy day project lol. _Time to make Fedora work on an '06 console._
Iceweasel is literally just Firefox rebranded. I think Debian had to do it because you're not allowed to use the Firefox trademarks if you recompile the source code. I don't know if that's still the case and cba to look it up.
3 things that would be interesting to try. First. Try getting a component cable if possible, and connect it to a more modern television with component input. (Or try that Wii HDMI thingy that exists.) It might give you more resolution options. Second. Try seeing if you can upgrade the version of Debian that it uses to the latest version compatible with PowerPC. If not then upgrade the packages and package repos at the very least. Third and finally. Try getting QEMU installed to see if you can technically "run" Windows XP on the Wii. (I'd also ask that you install the QEMU drivers to improve performance on XP.)
@@dylon4906 That's just the highest resolution the wii could use. It was a 480i system. But yeah with component cables maybe he could've gotten 480p. It wouldn't've made things any less cramped but it would've had more clarity.
@@Aeduo I heard that you can for the X display change it to a higher desktop resolution while maintaining the active signal resolution at 480i or 480p.. similar to AMD's FSR and NVIDIA's equivalent, but i don't know if the version of Linux that Micheal tried on the Wii has the specific command to do it. Then again that always has the tendency to just be blurry and unreadable.
just wanted to drop by and say I love your vids. Always such a chill and relaxing vibe and you do a lot of projects I would do myself. For instance, I've driven myself insane trying to get OS/2 installed on real hardware. Although now I have an actual PS/2 so theoretically, I should be able to do it (famous last words).
Hi Michal MJD, I've been following you for about 2 years and I tell you that your videos are amazing! I am Italian. Your videos are mixed between wii computer and apple tv etc. You are fantastic!
navigating around the OS was surprisingly faster and snappier than i thought it was going to be tbh. I wonder if the 3d acceleration works right. also, see if the DVD was shown up as a file in the /dev folder. Linux handles hardware as a file in the /dev folder. this is EVERYTHING including the wifi card, dvd player, and disks installed.
To play a DVD video, that wouldn't be helpful. The media player accesses the device through the block device interface, not through the filesystem. Although if he did mount it he could probably just play the .vob. I'd imagine either the drive wasn't working at all (I think there were different drive models between different Wiis, with different capabilities, and the driver might've not had full support for all the drive models) or the media players didn't know which device file to open.
From my poor memory; (Pretty sure I am correct though) The black wii can NOT play dvds no matter what. (Different internals) The original white ones, like the one used in this, can BUT you need a specific homebrew I can't remember the name of at the moment. You could likely transplant (paraphrasing) the code to the linux os as a proof of concept but it wouldn't be practical. Aside, IMHO, better off getting an ultra cheap dvd player than waste wear and tear on a wii to play movies. Cheers
The last update being 2008 really shows that even the homebrew scene didn't really think this was a particularly useful thing. lol. Getting your PS3 up and running as a supercomputer was probably more enticing.
Back in 2008 there was always someone at school talking about having linux on there ps3, i never actually saw it, but i know it was really possible, at the time, the idea of linux (a computer os that not many people had heard of) running on a console was the coolest thing ever. People were using it for piracy so sony eventually put out a update to stop it but in the early ps3 days it was wild, i think it was also possible on playstation 2
For DVD playback, you still need the Wii to have a drive that supports the stub. That'd be any early Wiis from 2006 or 07, and then morestill, you need the DVDX installer to add that stub. In theory homebrew should just support it, but that Wii may not? I'm blanking on previous videos.
Having tried to use a wii to play DVDs before (even going down the rabbit hole of installing linux on it). There are apparently some hardware level issues on most wii models other than the earliest ones that prevent DVD playback.
The disc drive is capable of it but has to be given a special command to enable it. It's considered not good for the drive though, because it has the drive busy all the time. I don't know if later models had other problems or removed the feature, since Nintendo didn't end up using it.
In a pinch, plugging in a USB optical drive that can read DVDs works. I remember doing that in WiiMC years ago, trying that for fun. I used my Wii as a primary media hub and DVD player a lot, using both MPlayer CE and WiiMC, once WiiMC came out. But my Wii was old enough to have an internal drive that can read DVDs. Around 2009, pretty early in the Wii's life cycle, Nintendo switched optical drives to ones that specifically couldn't play DVDs to combat piracy. USB loading was in its infancy in those days. People mainly burned DVD-Rs back then. I still have a stack of them hiding somewhere in my closet from the old days. Edit: I now mention MPlayerCE, something I forgot about. I forgot that I mainly used that for DVD playback because WiiMC didn't exist for a good while. Afterwards, WiiMC was what I used for 99% of DVDs or videos I threw at it, and used MPlayerCE for the remaining 1%. Good to have both.
Web Browser input/output error means no default browser is selected. Go to settings and set default apps. Also, change your resolution under display or by installing "arandr". Another is to try running the following terminal commands: sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade sudo apt dist-upgrade sudo apt autoremove The above commands will update the programs and any system files. This could give you the latest version.
Doubt it would upgrade much with those old package repos. Changing the resolution may make it hard to read on composite video out, however I do wonder how something like an HDMI Adapter would fare with higher resolutions, if at all supported.
I wonder if this could maybe be used as some sort of part to a build system for Wii homebrew/emulator developers? Obviously it's a separate OS, but maybe it could be useful past that. No idea honestly, great video though :)
Xfce has an oddity, it doesn't actually come with any browsers by default and what the web browser icon represents is actually a link to the browser you have manually set as the default web browser, in this case the input output error means that you do not have a set default web browser and have not linked it with the launcher. So for example if I'd set Firefox as my default browser that icon would open up Firefox.
You have no idea how long I've been waiting for a tutorial for this. I've spent the last YEAR trying to get this installed. There's only one other tutorial on yt and it skips 90% of the process. Now, u was using a different linux program. It was wii Linux, but it was from the user who made it. Got it from github and basically went into it head first
@@kaitlyn__L Mac OS 9 would definitely be possible, but then there's three things to face here: 1. Yes the Wii has enough RAM for OS 9, but then you're facing a different address layout compared to the PPC Macs. Also shared memory between CPU and GPU. Most if not all consoles are like this. 2. You'd have to figure out how to boot the system folder, the Wii uses a different boot ROM (or well, ROMs) compared to even the old world G3s (+ new world) or even G4s. 3. Graphics drivers. The Hollywood chip is custom. Knowing that it's ATI based, there IS a possibility, but it's based on something newer than a Rage 128 iirc.
I heard a snippet of Ersatz Bossa under your voice and it I immediately had a Pavlovian response to "Open the audio settings" and "turn the world audio back off" I may have quit VRC but those 4 years I wasted will never leave me. It's so surreal to try and open a menu on my hand and realize that the buttons aren't there.
PS - Black cat sucks, Pug is better specifically because having PCVR means there is a higher likelihood that you are above the age of 13 and won't screech slurs at the top of your lungs
I have some experience with playing DVDs on the Wii and while I only did it a couple of times I can say it's probably a good thing you didn't try. Admittedly I have a sample size of 1 console but using a different homebrew app seems to have damaged the drive, with it now making clicking sounds and having trouble playing Wii games (Though no problems with Gamecube discs oddly enough). My theory is that it has to do with the Wii's limited memory requiring it to run the drive at a higher than normal RPM and borking the motor
I don't think it would have changed speed. They just weren't very good drives. They wore out quickly. DVD playback made it worse because the disc is constantly being read, instead of only occasionally.
Great job! I would suggest trying to install a custom Android ROM on Blackberry Playbook as well.(if there is any community support during those 12 years, of course)
Iceweasel is the Debian unbranded build of Firefox that removes all the non OSS code from the browser including the trademarked branding. You can technically compile the Firefox source with a flag that will cause it to use the current code name and a non copyrighted globe logo that also drops the closed source code like the MP4 video playback code.
As a Debian user, here's what I can say: I've never used Debian 5, but at 8:12, "Xfce" is the Xfce menu, and "Apps / Help / XShells" is the legacy Debian menu that itself started going away in around Debian 7 or 8 and was basically phased out almost entirely in Debian 11. Iceweasel (at 11:32) was Debian's rebrand of Firefox due to a licencing issue that prevented Debian from shipping Firefox with official branding. Part-way through the lifecycle of Debian 8, the licencing issue was finally resolved and Iceweasel, Icedove, and Iceape were replaced with Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey respectively, and transitional dummy packages with transitional menu entries were created to redirect to those official releases, which were then done away with in Debian 9.
many years ago i used Linux on my Wii (most of the time to hear internet radio and to use an old printer). To watch DVDs, put the DVD in the Wii before starting Linux. That should work. I tried to watch Minions, Lord of the Rings and AVATAR (the James Cameron Movie) with VLC, but most of the time, after ~10 minutes VLC crashes. The only DVDs that worked every time was from the Moomins. Still dont know why. After that I quickly switched back to my old DVD player
So I came back here after nine months because I know some stuff about the DVD thing - First of all, there is actually a homebrew app that allows you to play media files on the Wii even without Linux. It's called WiiMC. It has support for DVDs too on supported models, which brings us to the topic of why it probably didn't work for you in the video - It only works on launch models (maybe 2nd gen models too, not sure). The thing is that Wii discs are actually somewhat physically different than regular DVD discs (that's why they can't be read in normal PC drives). On the early launch Wii models the drive had certain debug commands that allowed it to read normal DVD discs too (not CDs, it doesn't have the appropriate laser diode), but unfortunately Nintendo had removed that support from later models. Those later models are physically only capable of reading Wii discs, which is probably what happened in your case. Also there's the issue of whether you *should* play DVDs on your Wii and the answer is **NO**. One other difference between Wii discs and regular DVDs is that Wii discs are designed to be read at slower speed and therefore spin slower inside the drive. When you insert a regular DVD into the drive (doesn't matter if it's a DVD movie, game backup or just random files) you're forcing the drive to spin the disc at the regular speed of a DVD, which is faster than what the drive was designed for, and therefore causes stress on the drive and may wear it pretty quickly.
Something about the way he slid the Wii into frame was so smooth that it took my brain a second to realize that there was in fact now a Wii in frame and not just an empty table
I’m happy these kind of videos exist because I can’t do it myself because I’m terrified of bricking my wii with homebrew yes because my cousins wii was bricked from homebrew
whiite linux is way better than xwhiite, because xwhiite is based on whiite 0.1 which is based on Debian 4 while whiite goes as high as version 1.1 which is based on Debian 5. You can also upgrade to Debian 7 by adding swap space and upgrading to 6 then 7. It's not hard to just install an xserver and the Cube video driver yourself. You can still use the installer just by renaming the whiite Linux 1.1 tarball to the same name as the 0.1 version. It installs just fine, although the percentage will be wrong (I guess they hard coded the size of the file, so it appears to stall at 100% for a long time since 1.1 tarball is larger). Linux on the Wii is somewhat practically useful if you're a person who just wants a Linux machine to make or run software on, I used it a lot for PHP stuff and even ran a PHP server on it hosting a website back in high school since I didn't have money to buy a proper computer. It's also neat that you can pretty much turn a Wii into a PowerPC desktop computer, which it is hard to find affordable PowerPC computers if you have any particular interest in the PowerPC architecture.
For the network you probably can install nm (network manager), that configures the network automatically. And for the dvd... you should manually mount the disc pobably. I don't think that they put auto-mount. And also for the dvd video, I think you need "certain" libraries to decript the dvd. I don't know if vlc has the capability for it's own to decript them. Now if they could install linux on the wiiu, more power (cpu/gpu) more memory, and a more usable resolution. But of course... you can adapt on the this resolutions. My old pentim used 640x480 with 16bit or 800x600 with 256 colors, the wii it's much better as a desktop computer.
I briefly used a Wii as a Linux PC when my actual PC broke down. Of course all I really needed to do was edit some text files, so it was fine for that.
DVD support on Wii is a bit wierd. See, Nintendo originally planned to have DVD support natively, but scrapped the idea due to expensive licensing. Launch Wiis (from 2006, and *maybe* early 2007) can still play back DVDs through some homebrew tricks, but the disc drive was switched with an incapable model going forward. If you have a launch Wii, lucky you! But yours and my 2008 Wii won't ever be able to run DVD Video discs. Sorry There's a website (I forget the name, but couldn't link it if I wanted to) that lets you check DVD compatibility based on your serial number. Give that a go if you find it.
That’s pretty interesting. I’m surprised they didn’t make the user buy a license like Microsoft did. I remember being annoyed that I had to use a separate DVD player when the drive in my Wii technically was a DVD drive. (I preordered mine, but it didn’t come until March or April 07 due to the high demand, so now I’m curious when it was actually manufactured.)
That wasn't the only reason however. The laser within the compatible disc drive isn't a very good one and WILL break after using DVD's a few times on it.
The reason your wii cannot play DVDs is because when I tried loading a movie on wiimc using the dvd drive, it said "Unable to open DVD media", because it's a newer model than the ones that do support that.
Thank you for illustrating how pointless this is. The first thing I thought when reading the title was "Just why?" That 320x240 resolution is a dealbreaker for anyone wanting to actually use XWhiite or whatever. I'm surprised you hadn't heard of Iceweasel before.
Sucks that this is both not very functional and way too out of date to be acceptable even if it was. Kernel 2.6.32 was declared EOL-meaning it would no longer receive bugfixes-in March of 2016. I'd argue that this is a much worse security problem than using WPA[1] on your Wi-Fi.
