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.
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.
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._
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
This became a fucking essay, but bear with me. Sorry in advance. I'm an expert-level windbag. This takes me back. I haven't dabbled too much with Linux on the Wii. I actually screwed around with WiiToo, which I think is an older version of Bliight, because I've never heard of that one. It's been almost a decade since I've done stuff with Wii Linux. My aim was to try and upgrade it as much as I could, and I used Gentoo as my main OS back in the day, up until a few years ago. Used it for nearly a decade before I got sick and couldn't deal with maintaining my installs anymore. Adulthood came with more responsibilities and less time to faff around. So a lot of what works in Linux on the Wii depends on how you have BootMii installed. Unless there's a newer version of MIKE that I'm unaware of, you need BootMii installed in boot2 for it to work. The exploit and ability for installing BootMii in boot2 is key here, because it bypasses the Wii's IOS system completely, allowing Linux to have direct access to things like the WLAN adapter. Another goodie I remember off of the top of my head is that it also allows you to use the full 88MB of RAM the console has for applications and stuff. Normally, you have 64MB of working memory for applications, because 24MB of that 88MB total are reserved for the GPU to use. I'm only about 15 minutes into the video as I write this. Things could be different and I could be proven wrong. But most distributions you're likely to find are from the mid to late 2000's, and the way things work for these distributions reflects how things were in their time. For WiiToo, I managed to make a dedicated swap file on a USB hard disk so compiling wouldn't error out due to too little RAM. I updated portage to the latest version that would run under python 2.7 by treating it as broken, using the old documentation from the CVS attic that has been kept around by the Gentoo foundation for those of us who are doing things the "hard, dumb, has no other choice" way specifically. Then I upgraded the toolchain. The showstopper for me then was dealing with a big thing that has changed from those days in the late 2000's: udev. Most of udev's functions have been pushed into the kernel. The kernel is in charge of device creation and management now. Before, udev was in charge of it. I was stuck at an impasse. Either make upgrades and significant changes to the MIKE kernel base to get it to run a more modern kernel, like a 3.x series kernel at least, which can handle devices itself like modern udev and eudev versions expect, or go old-school static dev. Neither was something I was interested in doing. Compiling shit on the Wii takes forever. I think GCC alone took 2 weeks. I could never figure out how to get distcc and cross compiling to work, so I compiled stuff on the Wii. Fun. Oh, also, if you're crazy enough to try dabbling with Gentoo yourself on a Wii console, which I don't recommend, here's vital advice. If you're familiar with Gentoo, an old tweak to your CFLAGS in make.conf that everyone using Gentoo usually makes should be avoided. For the love of your Wii, DO NOT change "-j1" to "-j2". The Wii's cooling cannot keep up. Please! Stay with "-j1". Oh, and if you started using it when the default location for the make.conf is /etc/portage, it's not in that folder for older Gentoo systems that were installed before that change happened. It's going to be in /etc. Fun, dumb project. I don't regret my time with it. Practical? Hell no. Fun? For me, yes. I wouldn't recommend trying this specifically if you're not familiar with Linux, or even familiar with portage with Gentoo. This paragraph is tech jargon that you can skip if you're not interested. Portage is the best of the best that systems like slackbuilds and AUR are cheap imitations of (my opinion). Hot take, I know, but it's been around longer than those 2 relatively new systems. But portage, modeled after its older grandaddy, the BSD ports system, is not without issues. It's so sophisticated, VERY sophisticated, but slow because it works as a combination of Python, which is what portage itself is written in, and Bash scripts (specifically Bash scripts, with bashisms, which is why portage hard-depends on it, because of the need to do some things that's much easier to leverage bash-specific features for versus implementing it in purely POSIX-compliant Bourne shell scripts AFAIK. Edit: Glad to see BootMii in boot2 isn't necessary to get wireless internet working in Wii Linux anymore! Cool to see people still work on this. I should check out a Wii Linux distribution again for fun.
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.
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)
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 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.
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
@@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.
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
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.
DVDs are usually encrypted. You need the right libraries installed to decrypt them and many distros, like debian, don't have them installed by default, because of legal or ethical/moral objections. Try installing the libdvdread and/or libdvdcss libraries. You can also run `sudo blkid` to see if the system detects the disc. You can also get more screen space if you would just merge the bottom and top panels into one. And shrink it down some more anyways cause they're both still very large. And also shrink the titlebar. It's XFCE so getting a tiny title bar is very easy, even if you have/want to make one yourself. And don't ever bother with opera on Linux. It's always been trash. Even in its day, crApple's terrible opera port for Linux was very outdated and missing a lot of core elements. It's like they did it that way on purpose.
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
i think there might of been a disc selection error, maybe if you open VLC, run disc, set it to DVD instead of DVD menus, another alternative is adding music CDs, not as cool, but still good. great video btw
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
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.
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.
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.
Thats awesome!!!! Ive always been afraid of this because looks more complicated than the rest of the homebrew, but now seem pretty easy thanks to you. I have one question tho... Can you put more homebrew on that SD after deleting everything or now there is no way of doing it because the linux thingy doesnt work?
Linux is such a good OS. I love how good it is even on older hardware and there's not all that shit rubbing in the background slowing it down like in Windows.
Hah I remember doing that way back in the day. The older version was horrible, it even had graphical glitches. Impressed that the one showcased here can even web browse.
The Wii was a beast. I had one running the Debian distro as a torrent machine for more than two years without reboot.
damn that's crazy
Damn that’s crazy
@@qwerty555_ indeed
damn that's crazy
@@RokeJulianLockhart.s13ouq indeed (x2)
I just love how Linux can be installed on anything
Just like doom 🥲
you should look up how much stuff netbsd can run on
I'm waiting for linux on a pregnancy test
@@ZzxTheNeptuneSays1337 Probebly in the future on some kind of smart pregnancy test would have it. Like smart toasters etc :D
@@linux_for_noobs probably*
let's have a look what went wrong this time :D
more like D:
That's me lol
@@markusTegelane yeah cuz nothing went wrong :'(
@windybee not really it only didn't work because he set it up wrong.
@@SuperTort0ise DVD player didn't work
MJD's GIMP creations are incredible.
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.
Yeah, the configuration nonsense back then that was considered normal and acceptable haha.
Haha yeah that didn’t seem too strange to me😊
He could have tried searching for nmcli, NetworkManager, ModemManager & GUI packages. 🤷
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.
It wasn't so bad if you had the exact right hardware supported.
Hey MJD, VMHoss here. Thanks for trying my tutorial! The reason why you have to login as root is because audio playback won't work on the home user.
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.
look who I found in the wild :)
I've used 3DS Linux a long time ago when I was about 12-13
I remember that cheesy keyboard lol
@@Cheddy hey, still banned from discord?
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.
@@Aeduo Part of me is mad at you for being partially responsible for that keyboard, but also I can't really blame you lol
They totally missed the opportunity to call it "Wiinux". Otherwise really digging the concept, might try to install it myself. 🤩
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.
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.
no all the names got reverted back to normal years ago
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._
oh boy i have vague memories of experimenting with this as a kid, glad to see the wii getting some love
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).
When we wanted the Wii videos, it finally came back
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.)
I assumed the resolution was so low because it doesn't have a proper graphics driver
@@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.
Well you could use xrandr --output --scale 2 (or more)
@@perkelo2915 thats what i was talking about, thank you! xrandr! i always forget it's name. i need to start using linux more.
That’s awesome! I remember when you did windows 95 and windows me on the Wii! Nice memories of those old videos!
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!
I'm impressed with how smoothly this runs
The best about MJD’s videos is that in the 80% of them he makes a new awesome piece of art.
Beautiful. Simply beautiful. I'd love to see more Linux-related videos from you :)
You’re one of my absolute favorite channels on TH-cam, Keep up making awesome content like this!
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.
That Gimp Splash Screen brought back memories and the media player too. Good video!
you know windows has gone downhill when Michael starts doing linux vids
FINALLY MORE LINUX CONTENT
This guy is a mad genius
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.
This video warms my heart lol. I love the Wii and Linux!
The most impressive part is that this is like a 15 year old distro and you can still download and isntall packages on it.
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
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.
For the dvd, maybe you have to manually mount the disk, with the mount command?
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.
@@Aeduo it sounded like he put a regular video file on a data disc, not burned a video disc
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
/dev/sr0 is the disc drive device file in Linux usually...
If it ain't there, it ain't working.
@@xan1242 he didn't check since I don't know if he knows.
I bet I could daily drive this
wii is such a versatile console. love the amount of work the community has done to make it even better!
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
Woah the PS2 Linux video is already 1 year old, I still remember when it was published
The jump from the UI to that text installer is so jarring! 🤣🤣
Now I am feeling proud to be a linux user as my fav YT channel finally makes a linux video!
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 :)
I like the vids where you install linux on random things. More please! :)
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.
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.
This became a fucking essay, but bear with me. Sorry in advance. I'm an expert-level windbag.
This takes me back. I haven't dabbled too much with Linux on the Wii. I actually screwed around with WiiToo, which I think is an older version of Bliight, because I've never heard of that one. It's been almost a decade since I've done stuff with Wii Linux. My aim was to try and upgrade it as much as I could, and I used Gentoo as my main OS back in the day, up until a few years ago. Used it for nearly a decade before I got sick and couldn't deal with maintaining my installs anymore. Adulthood came with more responsibilities and less time to faff around.
So a lot of what works in Linux on the Wii depends on how you have BootMii installed. Unless there's a newer version of MIKE that I'm unaware of, you need BootMii installed in boot2 for it to work. The exploit and ability for installing BootMii in boot2 is key here, because it bypasses the Wii's IOS system completely, allowing Linux to have direct access to things like the WLAN adapter. Another goodie I remember off of the top of my head is that it also allows you to use the full 88MB of RAM the console has for applications and stuff. Normally, you have 64MB of working memory for applications, because 24MB of that 88MB total are reserved for the GPU to use.
I'm only about 15 minutes into the video as I write this. Things could be different and I could be proven wrong. But most distributions you're likely to find are from the mid to late 2000's, and the way things work for these distributions reflects how things were in their time.
For WiiToo, I managed to make a dedicated swap file on a USB hard disk so compiling wouldn't error out due to too little RAM. I updated portage to the latest version that would run under python 2.7 by treating it as broken, using the old documentation from the CVS attic that has been kept around by the Gentoo foundation for those of us who are doing things the "hard, dumb, has no other choice" way specifically. Then I upgraded the toolchain. The showstopper for me then was dealing with a big thing that has changed from those days in the late 2000's: udev. Most of udev's functions have been pushed into the kernel. The kernel is in charge of device creation and management now. Before, udev was in charge of it.
I was stuck at an impasse. Either make upgrades and significant changes to the MIKE kernel base to get it to run a more modern kernel, like a 3.x series kernel at least, which can handle devices itself like modern udev and eudev versions expect, or go old-school static dev. Neither was something I was interested in doing.
Compiling shit on the Wii takes forever. I think GCC alone took 2 weeks. I could never figure out how to get distcc and cross compiling to work, so I compiled stuff on the Wii. Fun.
Oh, also, if you're crazy enough to try dabbling with Gentoo yourself on a Wii console, which I don't recommend, here's vital advice. If you're familiar with Gentoo, an old tweak to your CFLAGS in make.conf that everyone using Gentoo usually makes should be avoided. For the love of your Wii, DO NOT change "-j1" to "-j2". The Wii's cooling cannot keep up. Please! Stay with "-j1". Oh, and if you started using it when the default location for the make.conf is /etc/portage, it's not in that folder for older Gentoo systems that were installed before that change happened. It's going to be in /etc.
Fun, dumb project. I don't regret my time with it. Practical? Hell no. Fun? For me, yes. I wouldn't recommend trying this specifically if you're not familiar with Linux, or even familiar with portage with Gentoo.
This paragraph is tech jargon that you can skip if you're not interested. Portage is the best of the best that systems like slackbuilds and AUR are cheap imitations of (my opinion). Hot take, I know, but it's been around longer than those 2 relatively new systems. But portage, modeled after its older grandaddy, the BSD ports system, is not without issues. It's so sophisticated, VERY sophisticated, but slow because it works as a combination of Python, which is what portage itself is written in, and Bash scripts (specifically Bash scripts, with bashisms, which is why portage hard-depends on it, because of the need to do some things that's much easier to leverage bash-specific features for versus implementing it in purely POSIX-compliant Bourne shell scripts AFAIK.
Edit: Glad to see BootMii in boot2 isn't necessary to get wireless internet working in Wii Linux anymore! Cool to see people still work on this. I should check out a Wii Linux distribution again for fun.
I haven't started watching, but let's hope everything doesn't go wrong...
Im 14 and Wii was my first console lol! great video bro
I’m 16 and the Wii was my Second console
0:55 RIP Ben "bushing" Byer. Letting Wii Homebrew happen. Tomorrow is 7 years since his passing
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.
It was deprecated in 2016 iirc, debian today comes with Firefox
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)
@@channelname9843 What about the BB10 models, such as Passport?
I love this so much. Thanks for making these videos
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.
@@resneptacle That might be true, but worth a try. The worse that will happen is he will have to redo everything.
WiiMC is awesome for playing DVDs at least on the original Wii that had GameCube backwards compatibly built in.
Nice video, please do more of Linux being installed onto random stuff!
That was amazing! I remember when you did Windows 95 and Windows Me on the Wii. Good memories of those old videos =)
Feabuary 8, 2023 12:22AM
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.
ty for making some epic background videos for me to listen to while i build
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
Interesting. I wonder if it's possible to hack and run Mac OS X, since the Wii's CPU is basically a higher clocked PowerPC 750 (G3).
Doubtful. The Wii only has 88 MB of memory.
@@R4dm1n Yeah, it'd be painfully slow. Even if it ran at all.
@@R4dm1n OS9 then!
@@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.
Using Linux and the virtualization software Mac on Linux it is possible to Run Mac OS 9.
I was planning to buy a wii tomorow, and with this video i know what i will be doing tmrw
That old splash screen for GIMP. Looks like something out of The South Bank Show, circa 1997.
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
Love videos like this where technology gets used in ways never intended!!
Useing the wii remote as a mouse sounds like a good idea
Next install Dolphin and emulate Wii on a Wii. Then run Linux inside Dolphin running inside Linux on a Wii.
U cant XD
I'm early this time. I can't wait to watch!
You probably needed to mount the dvd drive
I want the latest linux distros on every console, hopefully this scene gets more attention!
"2008 was the year my family got a Wii." What a coincidence, because my younger sister got one as a Birthday present in January 2008!
If your wii is an older model that is compatible with bootmii boot2 (
awesome video Michael! the Wii is such a powerful console
The Wii is such a beast, I mean it's efficient even it's not that hardware intensive but that also has its perks
Never knew some one could get so excited to get connected to the internet :D
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.
Yay a MJD Video
Great and fun video as always. I was hoping to see Doom running on this -Linux on the Wii- though...
You should try HD Retrovision's Wii Component cable. Makes the Wii look so much better.
DVDs are usually encrypted. You need the right libraries installed to decrypt them and many distros, like debian, don't have them installed by default, because of legal or ethical/moral objections.
Try installing the libdvdread and/or libdvdcss libraries.
You can also run `sudo blkid` to see if the system detects the disc.
You can also get more screen space if you would just merge the bottom and top panels into one. And shrink it down some more anyways cause they're both still very large. And also shrink the titlebar. It's XFCE so getting a tiny title bar is very easy, even if you have/want to make one yourself.
And don't ever bother with opera on Linux. It's always been trash. Even in its day, crApple's terrible opera port for Linux was very outdated and missing a lot of core elements. It's like they did it that way on purpose.
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
i think there might of been a disc selection error, maybe if you open VLC, run disc, set it to DVD instead of DVD menus, another alternative is adding music CDs, not as cool, but still good. great video btw
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
Awesome video, Michael!
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.
This is a birthday video for me.. I'm sad I missed it..
the old version based on debian 5 only works if you have the early version with a different wifi card
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.
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.
Thought this was going to be a boring video but then I saw it was an MJD video and then I had to watch :D
It has been a very very long time since I've seen a Linux desktop of that vintage...
Thats awesome!!!! Ive always been afraid of this because looks more complicated than the rest of the homebrew, but now seem pretty easy thanks to you.
I have one question tho... Can you put more homebrew on that SD after deleting everything or now there is no way of doing it because the linux thingy doesnt work?
i have been waiting for this
Linux is such a good OS. I love how good it is even on older hardware and there's not all that shit rubbing in the background slowing it down like in Windows.
Here is a fun video idea.
Install mol "mac on linux" on wii linux.
Mac os 9 on wii linux.
Wow, Linux is probably the one OS I’ve seen run on the largest variety of items
Hah I remember doing that way back in the day. The older version was horrible, it even had graphical glitches. Impressed that the one showcased here can even web browse.
Using WinRAR and a Wii in 2023! Pretty retro!
5:34 that moment when you say "BRUH" but then realise all is good moments later 🤣🤣
I appreciate this wii content
Dear LORD my ending ad was 43 minutes long. Luckily I sped it up
9:03 I don't come to this channel for a 'better solution'. I come to this channel for an MJD solution where everything goes wrong anyways.
I believe you need a specific revision of the Wii for DVDs to work in the disc drive.
Which is mainly why your Wii isn't recognising the DVD.
Yeah that's what I've read too
Yea only the very first models have it
I love how the Wii lives on as a tool to be modded on