GC-Forever Distribution Development

Discussion for GC-Linux on Gamecube & Wii
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_Nold_
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GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by _Nold_ » Wed Feb 15, 2012 12:51 pm

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 :P (I was thinking about "GC-Linux Forever" :lol:)

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 :D

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...
| DOL-001 (EUR) Indigo | WKF Plug'n'Play Diskdrive Replacement | BBA |
| Internalised: WaveBird, Keyboard Adapter, MemoryCard, SD-Adapter |

| DOL-001 (EUR) | >> First Gamecube Portable - Worklog
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by emu_kidid » Wed Feb 15, 2012 1:14 pm

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 :)
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liquitt
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by liquitt » Wed Feb 15, 2012 1:47 pm

without a better framebuffer you can forget the idea of X. slow as hell.
as emu said, farter's framebuffer drive woulde be cool
please search before you ask - a lot has been discussed already!
(or use google with "site:gc-forever.com *term*")
http://is.gd/MDmZcr

we also have a wiki filled with knowledge
http://is.gd/dX58Rm
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infact
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by infact » Wed Feb 15, 2012 2:05 pm

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.
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by liquitt » Wed Feb 15, 2012 2:21 pm

sure, and i've done some tests and messing around too so we should definetly have a chat about this :P
please search before you ask - a lot has been discussed already!
(or use google with "site:gc-forever.com *term*")
http://is.gd/MDmZcr

we also have a wiki filled with knowledge
http://is.gd/dX58Rm
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by sumas » Wed Feb 15, 2012 7:56 pm

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

Like the Wii Homebrew Channel much better?
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by infact » Wed Feb 15, 2012 8:56 pm

no.
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by _Nold_ » Thu Feb 16, 2012 6:33 am

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.. ^^
| DOL-001 (EUR) Indigo | WKF Plug'n'Play Diskdrive Replacement | BBA |
| Internalised: WaveBird, Keyboard Adapter, MemoryCard, SD-Adapter |

| DOL-001 (EUR) | >> First Gamecube Portable - Worklog
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by liquitt » Thu Feb 16, 2012 8:18 am

don't you mean lynx? ;)
please search before you ask - a lot has been discussed already!
(or use google with "site:gc-forever.com *term*")
http://is.gd/MDmZcr

we also have a wiki filled with knowledge
http://is.gd/dX58Rm
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by _Nold_ » Thu Feb 16, 2012 8:26 am

| DOL-001 (EUR) Indigo | WKF Plug'n'Play Diskdrive Replacement | BBA |
| Internalised: WaveBird, Keyboard Adapter, MemoryCard, SD-Adapter |

| DOL-001 (EUR) | >> First Gamecube Portable - Worklog
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by liquitt » Thu Feb 16, 2012 8:32 am

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
please search before you ask - a lot has been discussed already!
(or use google with "site:gc-forever.com *term*")
http://is.gd/MDmZcr

we also have a wiki filled with knowledge
http://is.gd/dX58Rm
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by _Nold_ » Thu Feb 16, 2012 9:24 am

it even has mouse support, if we can emulate a mouse with the controller it should be pretty cool.. not perfect but cool :D
| DOL-001 (EUR) Indigo | WKF Plug'n'Play Diskdrive Replacement | BBA |
| Internalised: WaveBird, Keyboard Adapter, MemoryCard, SD-Adapter |

| DOL-001 (EUR) | >> First Gamecube Portable - Worklog
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by emu_kidid » Thu Feb 16, 2012 11:26 am

something like MFE would be nice :)
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by _Nold_ » Thu Feb 16, 2012 12:19 pm

yea, the question is: Does somebody know a project like this or do we need to programm something from scratch...
| DOL-001 (EUR) Indigo | WKF Plug'n'Play Diskdrive Replacement | BBA |
| Internalised: WaveBird, Keyboard Adapter, MemoryCard, SD-Adapter |

| DOL-001 (EUR) | >> First Gamecube Portable - Worklog
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by liquitt » Thu Feb 16, 2012 12:28 pm

i'd rather go from scratch so we can have it the way we want (especially considering hardware etc)
please search before you ask - a lot has been discussed already!
(or use google with "site:gc-forever.com *term*")
http://is.gd/MDmZcr

we also have a wiki filled with knowledge
http://is.gd/dX58Rm
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by infact » Thu Feb 16, 2012 2:07 pm

The MFE code is open source btw.
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by _Nold_ » Thu Feb 16, 2012 2:18 pm

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 ^^
| DOL-001 (EUR) Indigo | WKF Plug'n'Play Diskdrive Replacement | BBA |
| Internalised: WaveBird, Keyboard Adapter, MemoryCard, SD-Adapter |

| DOL-001 (EUR) | >> First Gamecube Portable - Worklog
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by _Nold_ » Wed Feb 22, 2012 8:04 am

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..
| DOL-001 (EUR) Indigo | WKF Plug'n'Play Diskdrive Replacement | BBA |
| Internalised: WaveBird, Keyboard Adapter, MemoryCard, SD-Adapter |

| DOL-001 (EUR) | >> First Gamecube Portable - Worklog
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by liquitt » Wed Feb 22, 2012 9:18 am

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
please search before you ask - a lot has been discussed already!
(or use google with "site:gc-forever.com *term*")
http://is.gd/MDmZcr

we also have a wiki filled with knowledge
http://is.gd/dX58Rm
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by _Nold_ » Thu Feb 23, 2012 12:46 pm

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 ;)
| DOL-001 (EUR) Indigo | WKF Plug'n'Play Diskdrive Replacement | BBA |
| Internalised: WaveBird, Keyboard Adapter, MemoryCard, SD-Adapter |

| DOL-001 (EUR) | >> First Gamecube Portable - Worklog
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by emu_kidid » Thu Feb 23, 2012 1:11 pm

noticed any performance gain with farters FB?
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by liquitt » Thu Feb 23, 2012 1:14 pm

Noldor wrote: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 ;)
please search before you ask - a lot has been discussed already!
(or use google with "site:gc-forever.com *term*")
http://is.gd/MDmZcr

we also have a wiki filled with knowledge
http://is.gd/dX58Rm
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by _Nold_ » Thu Feb 23, 2012 1:17 pm

damn, channel and Server? :D

//Edit: ok found it :D EF-NET #gc-forever ^^
| DOL-001 (EUR) Indigo | WKF Plug'n'Play Diskdrive Replacement | BBA |
| Internalised: WaveBird, Keyboard Adapter, MemoryCard, SD-Adapter |

| DOL-001 (EUR) | >> First Gamecube Portable - Worklog
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by liquitt » Thu May 24, 2012 1:47 pm

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

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/mess ... d=29309168
please search before you ask - a lot has been discussed already!
(or use google with "site:gc-forever.com *term*")
http://is.gd/MDmZcr

we also have a wiki filled with knowledge
http://is.gd/dX58Rm
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Re: GC-Forever Distribution Development

Post by alzen » Wed May 29, 2013 11:29 am

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.
Take a look at my YouTube channel - totally dedicated to retro shooters
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