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.