GC-Forever Distribution Development

[_Nold_]

Hi Community

Since we can now use SDHC Cards to boot GC-Linux, i wanted to build a little Distribution for it.
The first question is: What do we want from this distibution?

I would say:
- Play Media (Movies, Music, from SD/Network - SD-Movies are pretty laggy, maybe there is a better mplayer option or something i don't know...)
- Surf through the Web (would be cool, but requires a complete GUI)
- Play games/emu's etc. (and load them directly from web (apt-get, ...))

So we will really need a complete GUI and i don't think there is a real alternativ to X.org (TinyX?!)...
But i think we could emulate a mouse with the controller...
And of curse we need a really cool name (I was thinking about "GC-Linux Forever" )

I had real trouble working on the rootfs, because i couldn't use debootstrap for it, since i don't have a real powerpc...
Now i found this and hope it's the soulution of all my problems: http://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/powerpc/
A ready to rumble Debian PowerPC QEmu Image

After we got a working ip-stack + apt-get on the cube, it should be really easy building up the whole distro...

And now i hope on your ideas, knowledge, creativity, etc...

[emu_kidid]

Unfortunately mplayer/anything that wants to stream from the sd card will be slow as it's polled I/O and takes up cpu cycles. This is why we want DMA on the ide-exi and what isobel was working on.

I'd still like to see a distro, and if you use farters better and improved fb driver you will get good emulation performance for basic emulators/etc.

I think it'd be good for small applications/emulation/server though

[liquitt]

without a better framebuffer you can forget the idea of X. slow as hell.
as emu said, farter's framebuffer drive woulde be cool

[infact]

Well, farters framebuffer hack just makes a difference in speed when only small parts of the screen are changed, so a no-go for games/emulators...

My name suggestion "QLi"

btw. I already have done some tests with archlinuxppc on cube, maybe we can work something out that can be used on both.

[liquitt]

sure, and i've done some tests and messing around too so we should definetly have a chat about this

[sumas]

may it be possible to run out of Linux GC Games from Drive/IDE EXI/WODE Wiikey?

Like the Wii Homebrew Channel much better?

[infact]

no.

[_Nold_]

So, basicly all we want from the gui would be
- Start emulators (Some kind of Shortcuts)
- Filebrowser to playMediafiles.. at least MP3 works well..

There should be some simple frontend like MFE for that.. We could also add some shortcuts for downloading emus/etc.
f.e. i remember that Supertux was running great ^^

And i remember we used "links" (CLI-Based browser) on DS-Linux and it supports grafics.. ^^

[liquitt]

don't you mean lynx?

[_Nold_]

Nope, it was links --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_%28web_browser%29

[liquitt]

oh okay, nice. never heard of it....looks nice though but seems to lack compatibility for most websites. shouldnt be a problem if we set one up for it though

[_Nold_]

it even has mouse support, if we can emulate a mouse with the controller it should be pretty cool.. not perfect but cool

[emu_kidid]

something like MFE would be nice

[_Nold_]

yea, the question is: Does somebody know a project like this or do we need to programm something from scratch...

[liquitt]

i'd rather go from scratch so we can have it the way we want (especially considering hardware etc)

[infact]

The MFE code is open source btw.

[_Nold_]

Yea, we could use this for the media part.. but one thing i hated about MFE was, that it just playes one song and then stops, .. could work on that..

I wanted to do that years ago but my toolchain didn't compile it so i gave it up ^^

[_Nold_]

Ok, i will have a look at farters framebuffer tomorrow.. and i will set up my VM for rootfs building..
Would be cool if we could use git or something for rootfs-development.. i will take a look at that tomorrows, too.

Would be really cool if the people who have some kind of "more advanced" root filesystems (infact, liquitt, ..?) could upload them.. even arch-linux..
That would help me a lot to get a faster startup..

[liquitt]

yeah if infact is up for this i'd say we three should have a nice little chat about all this
about ideas, the rootfs and whatnot

[_Nold_]

Sounds great!
I just found the rootfs provided by gc-linux for NFS use.
It's about 100MB big and really easy to configure (has a script for it ^^)..

I'm also starting to set up Git for the Kernel and maybe for RootFS..

And how do you guys want to chat? IRC? Just tell me i'll join.

//Edit:
Oh, and i patched the FB with farters patch

[emu_kidid]

noticed any performance gain with farters FB?

[liquitt]

Sounds great!
I just found the rootfs provided by gc-linux for NFS use.
It's about 100MB big and really easy to configure (has a script for it ^^)..

I'm also starting to set up Git for the Kernel and maybe for RootFS..

And how do you guys want to chat? IRC? Just tell me i'll join.

//Edit:
Oh, and i patched the FB with farters patch

yeah both of us are on irc almost all the time

[_Nold_]

damn, channel and Server?

//Edit: ok found it EF-NET #gc-forever ^^

[liquitt]

dont want to open a new thread, somebody made a usb gecko driver patch:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/mess ... d=29309168

[alzen]

Wow, super cool discussion is going on I see. Personally, I'm linux enthusiast for about 10 years now and it's cool to see something is going on in that matter.

Personally the most useful option for me would be linux based media-player(MFE i guess) with possibility to read from the SD card. I would use this instead current port of MPlayer for GC which is pretty buggy.

I was always interested in GC Linux but didn't have time to try te current distro though.