Wii U Linux

Hey all! About 5:30-5:45ish CST, I'll be live again! (Like always, we may or may not be playing a bit of MK8 beforehand-join early for a bit of fun!)

You can find the stream here: tinyurl.com/CompuCatStream

 

Hey all, minor snag. It seems Debian Sid, our primary distribution, is no longer hosting PowerPC packages; these were the packages being used to create and maintain Debian installations on linux-wiiu. Expect apt-get, etc. to be broken. We're considering potential solutions right now. (This is also making development quite difficult; our existing systems are fine, but we can't spin up any new Debian PPC systems except old releases of Debian Jessie.)

Sorry we don't have more good news.

-the linux-wiiu dev team

 

Is this useful? https://snapshot.debian.org/

It's quite annoying when packages are deleted. I was trying to find non-free packages for an old HP thin client based on the Marvell Dove platform, but the only ones on the Ubuntu archive are for free software.

 

SID is still available?
http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/

 

Yes, but not the PowerPC packages.

 

Hmm, I'll check out those links soon. Probably won't be until next week, I have poor internet access right now. The repo Kitsumi linked seems like it might have some packages; maybe Debian just moved the packages there? Will investigate later.

 

Confirming my suspicions, Debian dropped PowerPC support from Sid in August 2017. We got lucky the first time actually-many mirrors just held onto the packages for a while, but now we're starting to lose most of them.

Again, Quark and I are working on some solutions. For the intrepid, I haven't tested this, but julialy's suggestion of using snapshot.debian.org should work to keep apt running and all. You'll just need to update your sources.list. (I'll test once I'm back in my workspace this coming week with stable Internet access.) YMMV.

 

Hey everyone! I'm here with some quick updates with what we've found out and what you can do. Thanks to the help of several people here, on Twitter, and other methods, we've been able to come up with a few solutions for you guys.

So, here's the stich. In August 2017, Debian officially dropped PowerPC support. We were lucky though, since the unstable/sid packages kept being updated anyway and stayed on the mirrors. However, the time finally came sometime in the past month, and we noticed the packages had vanished and installations had started failing. While we initially thought this was the end of the road for Debian on linux-wiiu, it turns out something much simpler happened - debian moved their powerpc packages onto ports.debian.org, where it now shares a home with architectures like alpha, sparc, sh4 and m68k as an "unofficial port". If you point your Wii U at this new location, you can keep using Debian like you always have.

Don't do that too quickly, though - I'd also like to announce a new distribution available for linux-wiiu! If you're sick of Debian or you can't get it to work quite right, you can now use Lubuntu 16.04! This version of Lubuntu is much more user friendly than our old Debian image - coming with a fully working X server, desktop environment and internet connection wizard right out of the box. I've also worked hard on the images, and I hope installing will be much easier this time - we'll get to how you can install this in just a bit.

So, that's your options. You can keep using Debian or switch to Lubuntu. Let's go over how you can do each one:

Keeping Debian

Spoiler

In order to get Debian back to the way it should be, you'll need to make some changes to apt. Don't worry - it's quite simple. First, you'll need to boot up your console and get to a root shell - Doing this depends on how you've set everything up, though the default Debian install should boot right into one. If you've added a desktop environment, look for a terminal program - If you can't find one, you can switch to a built-in console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 (or any F key between 2 and 6) and logging in as root.
Once you're in, you'll need to open "/etc/apt/sources.list" in a text editor. Debian-wiiu ships with nano, so you should type the following:

Code:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

You may have changed this file a bit, but the default one looks like this:

Code:

deb http://mirror.linux.org.au/debian sid main
deb [trusted=yes] https://deb.heyquark.com/ ./

If you have the heyquark line, you should comment it out by adding a "#" to the start of the line. It'll make updates a lot faster since I haven't got that repository online at the moment. Anyway, what we actually need to do is change whatever URL is before "sid main" (some may have changed it, I hear ftp.debian.org is popular) to "http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports". After this is done, the file should look something like this:

Code:

deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports sid main
#deb [trusted=yes] https://deb.heyquark.com/ ./

Next, you'll need to teach apt to trust ports.debian.org. If you jump straight in you'll start getting strange errors about public keys, so we need to sort all that out first. You can do it with a single command:

Code:

wget -O- ports.debian.org/archive_2018.key | apt-key add -

That's a capital O (as in "boop"). You might have to update the year on the end of that URL if you're reading this in the future. You'll get a bunch of output, finishing with "OK". Once that's done, run the following two commands:

Code:

apt-get update
apt-get install debian-ports-archive-keyring

You're now good to go! Since you probably haven't updated your packages in a while, it'd be a good idea to run apt-get upgrade as well. You can now update and install packages again without any problems!

Installing Lubuntu

Spoiler

Our version of Lubuntu comes in two flavours - Desktop and Server. The Server version is very similar to the Debian image we've already been distributing for a while now, though it can be very easily transformed into a Desktop machine. The Desktop version is, well, Lubuntu! The installation for each version is very similar, so these instructions will work no matter which version you pick.
First, you'll need to download one of the images. These are raw disk images, so they should be easier to flash.

• Desktop (2.0GiB extracted - use a USB of at least 3GiB)
• Server (300MiB extracted - use a USB of at least 512MiB)

Once you've downloaded one, you'll need to flash it to a USB. How you do this depends on your OS - I've been using dd, but I guess etcher could work. It should be kinda similar to the current Windows instructions - I'll update this post once it gets figured out. In any case, you should be able to flash this image and boot into Lubuntu!
Both images will boot straight to a commandline login screen - log in as "root" with the password "wiiu". First order of business is to change that - run "passwd" and follow the prompts to change the root password. If you're on Server, the partition for the USB is only 300MiB, while the Desktop variant is 2GiB. While 300MiB should be enough for anybody, I've written a script to grow that to the full size of your USB - you should run the following:

Code:

/usr/local/share/linux-wiiu/rootfs_enlarge.sh

If it works, your Wii U should reboot. For Server users, you're done! Desktop users are probably a tad disappointed by the commandline they've been using - let's fix that. Log back in as root with your new password and run this command:

Code:

dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
reboot

Your Wii U will reboot again, but this time Linux will start right up to a login screen! From here, it's a good idea to log in as a guest and make yourself a user account - look at System Tools -> Users and Groups in the apps menu (it may ask for your root password). Enjoy!

 

Keep up the good work !

 

Thanks Quark! It kinda sucks that Debian dropped PowerPC support though...

 

That's some effort, Quark. Thanks!

 

I Haven't Actually used Linux on The Wii U Yet But I'm Curious have they implemented WiFi Yet with Lubuntu?

 

I Haven't Actually used Linux on The Wii U Yet But I'm Curious have they implemented WiFi Yet with Lubuntu?

— Posts automatically merged - Please don't double post! —

Sorry about that I didn't realize I posted twice is there anyway to delete it?

 

We haven't implemented the onboard Wi-Fi chipset yet; we're still sorting out some SDIO driver issues. With a bit of kernel adjustment, we should be able to get USB Wi-Fi working easily enough.

 

Okay Thanks.

 

Would be great if you could document your issues you are finding so far. I want to port some DSi WIFI drivers, but I think I got my hacked DSi 2 days ago and fully busy now. But anything a devops could document (at least issues, timeouts, or basic SDIO init handshake) would be of help.

 

I'll bug rw about that when I get a chance. Not sure how helpful it'll be though; DSi and WiiU are completely different beasts.

 

Entirely different. But since ninty does weird setups as conecting AHB master to SDIO ports, there's some handshake (something like a sync / send to coprocessor command, that's bypassed as a pseudo prefetch abort [the ARM cores have "levels" of exceptions, and if the opcode falls back to coprocessor out, the abort signal is cancelled]) that must be common in there so it allows to send data between cpu -> wifi (albeit that bus controller should be hidden). Also the DRH-WUP 811309G31 seems to use USB or SDIO to access onboard bluetooth, the BCM43362KUB6 802.11n and the BCM43237KMLG.

I remember reading the whole open source Atheros AR600x (ath6kl) and it consisted of a binary that ran inside the card, and a client running in the host OS (so commands would go through the SDIO bus):

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/ath6kl

and

https://github.com/digidotcom/atheros/tree/master/compat-wireless

(ath6kl)

Well, i woudn't be impressed if ninty came up with a similar setup for WiiU wireless. Would be interesting to see a resemblance in there

 

Honestly, we really have no idea how it works. There's a set of sdhci regs that wiiubrew claims is the SDIO link to the 2.4GHz wireless controller (a BCM43362), but you point Linux to it and it'll send command after command, always "timing out" (remarkably fast for a timeout). If any of its commands actually did anything we might be able to try the native Linux drivers, which should - at least in theory - work fine. As it is now though, it won't even detect the card on the other end, let alone communicate with it. It's really weird - the controller claims to be in more or less the same state as the one for the SD card slot, and yet it doesn't want to work.
On a vaguely related note, I do remember reading that Nintendo uses a custom firmware for the BCM43237 (seems to be a custom chip anyway) to make the DRC work. I'd imagine this is part of the reason the Gamepad works fine even when we're running a fully custom OS (linux-wiiu) - kinda similar to that Atheros chipset.

 

So, if we were to get the WiFi working, we might also be able to get the gamepad to connect to linux as well.
An interesting resource might be http://libdrc.org/docs/index.html

 

The GamePad uses a separate 5GHz Wi-Fi chipset; that's the BCM43237 Quark's talking about. If we took manual control of that, we could get 5GHz Wi-Fi at the expense of the GamePad or have finer control of the GamePad's display through libdrc. We might just want to leave it as-is, though; we have a framebuffer set up to output to the GamePad independently of the main OS. Using libdrc would likely introduce quite a bit of software overhead.