'(vidak) 🌱 on Nostr: HOW TO INSTALL EMACS ON YOUR NINTENDO WII 2019-12-15Why is this an interesting thing ...

HOW TO INSTALL EMACS ON YOUR NINTENDO WII

2019-12-15Why is this an interesting thing to carry out?

the nintendo wii is my favourite video game console, because its hardware design is fascinating, and it is by far one of the easiest consoles to jailbreak and root

also its controllers, with all due respect, were revolutionary, and really made video games more accessible to an enormously broad and diverse audience

the console encouraged innovative human-computer interface metaphors, many of which were completely speculative, experimental, and entirely novel.

it is a fascinating and unique piece of hardware :-)

my main desire for getting linux on this wii was to read emails and listen to internet radio etc on it, and use it primarily as a very low power desktop computer!

so i suppose what i’m carrying out isn’t really an absolute, universal good, for all people - but i am certainly able to now use this device to pirate a great many games, and utilise its exceptional graphics processing performance for things, like watching videos etc etc

but yes! aside from that, there is no real use, apart from practicing software freedom, really!

okay this is what you do to get linux working on your Wii:

download the debian distribution prepared for the Wii here: https://github.com/neagix/wii-linux-ngx

the kernel version is pretty old, it’s 3.15 or some verison of 3.X

but once you do that, make 2 partitions on an SD card:

(1) - FAT16 (for booting the exploit which loads the kernel, basically the hacked bootloader which you got access to once you rooted your console). i’d recommend making this boot partition about 50MiB big

(2) - some ext3 or ext4 partition, of a nice large size - i’d recommend using a 64GiB SD card, because you’ll need a really big swap file for this install

put the bootloader ELF files in the FAT16 partition, and put the linux root filesystem in the ext3/4 partition

slap dat SD card in, and select the kernel image from the BootMii menu you installed when you rooted your console.

Welcome to Linux. (~ o w o )~ _/

what to do in order to update the system:

this is what your /etc/apt/sources.list file should look like:

deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports unstable main

deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports sid main

deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports experimental main

this is because Debian has removed support for PowerPC CPUs. you need to get the apt repository that they’ve archived.

but once you’d done that, and you’ve got your networking going, (which most would be able to do because it’s debian), you should be able to:

apt-get update

and then All Should Be Right In The World. with a simple

apt-get install emacs

you should now be able to use emacs on your Nintendo Wii

:-)

https://zoinks.one/media/317c25b26ec028cba01678d7f57d26e914c3ca3c76d9c03921d6ea1ccff8c44e.txt