Easy Wii Linux: Instant PC

Quote
linus
@q885 You cant install EWL to a partition because of how the kerenl is built, but you can access the FAT partition by taking the umounts out of /etc/rc.local.

Finally visited my friend and tried this out. It works great! Unfortunately, dillo won't load the pages I want, so I installed Iceweasel, which is so slow and still can't do some of the things I want. Still, everything else seems to work great. Thanks!

When connecting to the Wii an USB external hard drive featuring music and video files, can somehow this Linux be utilized as an UPnP server? Or at least, as a regular file server, seeing the USB disk as a shared network folder, accessible from Windows or Android?
Any clues?

Hey!

Everytime when I try to boot from my SD card this message pops up: [picpaste.de]

I don't know how to fix it and don't even know why it comes. Any ideas? Think it fails to mount "loop0" as writen on the screenshot, but why does it work for other?

Well, its been awhile, but I finally got an actual keyboard hooked up to the wii. I completely forgot I had a Targus Port Replicator in my possession that could successfully bridge a USB>PS2 connection. So, I tried firing up EWL and making some modifications to /etc/rc.local.

Quote
linus
@q885 You cant install EWL to a partition because of how the kerenl is built, but you can access the FAT partition by taking the umounts out of /etc/rc.local.

I wanted access to the FAT32 patition on the SD card, so I took the umount lines out, like you said. Upon bootup, however, I have this error:

Startpar: service(s) returned failure: rc.local ... failed!

It then hangs and I can't re-open rc.local, or properly boot EWL, without re-writting the linuxdsk.img with a fresh copy. What am I doing wrong?

-edit-

FIGURED IT OUT!! Turns out you also need to comment out the "blockdev --flushbuffs /dev/ram0" line as well. Ok, everything's back to normal.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/13/2012 04:38AM by Joelgp1.

Alright, new problem -- the system is not properly mounting my Android smartphone when I plug it in and put it into USB Mass Storage Mode.

I plug it in, and the system obviously does something -- on the phone I get both the charging indicator, the USB Debug-Mode notice (In case I want to use ADB commands or USB Tethering), and the USB Connected notice (which is where I am able to tell the phone to expose the SD card to the host system).

The phone is a Samsung Galaxy Prevail. Unlike most of the popular phones, this one does NOT have mountable internal storage, only the external SD card is to be seen by the host system when I plug it in & put it into MSM.

Alas, when I do all that, and navigate to /media/USBx/, I get nothing. Is there something I'm missing? The SD card in question is an 8gb card, with only a single FAT32 partition. And yes, Both the Galaxy Prevail and my Win7 machine can see the contents of the card properly.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2012 08:07AM by Joelgp1.

I hope that this is of help to some people, and that this gets added to the main post or stickied.

Various tips:
Getting EWL to boot
Atleast for me, I had an issue getting EWL to boot correctly. Using the direct video kernels and then booting them from HBC/Postloader would only result in the kernel failing to mount the memory card. Try booting the kernel from BootMii as you might have better luck and as in my case, success.

Configuring Timezone
EWL ships with a Timezone that is probably not the correct one for your area. To change it, run:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

After doing this you will need to fix the time as it will be shifted after changing the timezone.

Resize the disk image:
Note: Do not perform this operation on the linuxdsk.img EWL uses while it is running. Do it offline or on another copy.

Step One: expand the image.

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k count=1024 >> linuxdsk.img

In the above example, 1024k (bs) times 1024 (count) makes 1048576k (1GB) which gets added to linuxdsk.img resulting in a 2GB file. If you want to add more, repeat the command until desired size.
Remember, you MUST use >> on the above command.

Step Two: check the image.
resize2fs won't resize the filesystem until it is clean, so we have to force a check on it.

e2fsck -f linuxdsk.img

Step Three: resize the image.
After checking the filesystem, resize2fs shouldn't complain about the image being unclean, and resize to the new size.

resize2fs linuxdsk.img

If it does happen to tell you to check the disk again, repeat step two and then attempt to resize it. If it tells you to do it again, you can try to force it to resize:

resize2fs -f linuxdsk.img

Congrats! Your disk image should now be larger allowing for more program space. If this is still too small for you, you can attempt to do the program removal techniques by flits on the first page.

Free up space:

Remove packages
EWL comes with some packages that you may not need when using it.

Some packages that you may not need are:

lostirc sylpheed bitlbee bittornado leafpad scite vim-common epdfview xzgv xpaint ace-of-penguins telnet debian-faq doc-debian doc-linux-text laptop-detect mac-fdisk ntfs-3g pciutils

Just run the following command, you can put more than one package on the line:

apt-get purge pkgName1 pkgName2 ...

Then remove packages that are no longer needed by any application:

apt-get autoremove

If for any reason you want to add back something you removed, just use:

apt-get install pkgName1

Remove locales
*nix systems commonly come with a bunch of locale's for various languages, you can remove these additional locales with the following command:
Note: Run this command in xterm, rxvt doesn't display the colors right.

apt-get install localepurge
localepurge

Wifi issues and fixes:

Configuration bug
The Wifi Configurator seems to have a bug that some people (including me) have to fix.
Go into root and run iwconfig, root's password is easy

su
iwconfig

If you see a wlan1, run this:

nano -c /root/whiite-ez-wifi-config

And change line 33 from

IFACE=wlan0

to

IFACE=wlan1

DNS Errors?
Go into /etc/resolv.conf and add a few more DNS options, by default EWL uses OpenDNS.

nano -c /etc/resolv.conf

Add the following lines before the first nameserver line:

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

That will attempt to use Google DNS before OpenDNS, hopefully you can browse again!



Edited 12 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2013 08:31PM by gamax92.

@gamax92 nice tips. Thanks for your contributions.

I'm wondering if I can use something like this to be able to play MUDs like aardwolf. Does anyone know if that would be possible?

While this does work quite well for me, I would like to build an IOS Kernel and an improved MINI Kernel that doesn't suffer from the same memory leaks and various I/O issues that this one does with most 16GB or greater class 10 SD cards. I've already created a Git repository and linked it with Github at "https://github.com/DeltaResero" and would like to build some Kernels that work with this image as well. I'm able to build Kernels for those that follow the "Whiite" style, but am not sure how to with ones in this format as they'll likely need ramdisks and I'm not familiar with how ramdisks work. I'm assuming that it'll have to use an initramfs, but don't much about how to create one or what is even needed in one. Can I just use the demo one on the wiki page here or is there a way that I can copy the one that this Kernel uses?

Also, I'm working on a 3.8 Kernel forward port of the mikep5 patch and have successful ported to 3.6 so far. I'm not going to make it public until I get a chance to test it with a 3.8 Kernel. If for some reason I can't get it to work with 3.8 before the end of March, I'll just release a 3.4 (longterm) Kernel patch instead. So far everything seems to work, but it will need a lot of testing when I do eventually release it publically as my knowledge in "C" is quite limited. Hopefully with this, it should make it possible to use Wheezy Debian on the Wii without having to hold back udev packages.

APRIL 2013 UPDATE:
Due to a hard drive failure, I've lost my work following 3.0 but I was able restore the 3.0 port I previously made. It can now be found on Github at the address I mentioned above, just note that there are still few bugs as I noted in the readme there. 3.1+ Kernels currently don't work with MINI and there's not much reason to use one due to all the regressions and the fact that the same thing happens with 3.7-rc1. 3.7-rc1 becomes completely unbootable and unlike 3.1, I was unable to solve the issue as there is no debug info (only a black screen). With this 3.0 Kernel, Debian Wheezy is now bootable without all the udev errors that occured in 2.6.32. The main advantages of using Wheezy for me was that mplayer works, lightdm becomes available, and pcmanfm is more configurable. It appears that's there is even a slight throughput boost and reduce in CPU demand at the cost of RAM.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/2013 12:43AM by DeltaResero.

I found that you can just run telnet in the terminal and connect to aardwolf that way. For anyone that might play it, you will probably want to make the background of the terminal black and the foreground white to make it readable. I can't seem to get my settings to permanently save for .Xresources or .Xdefault if anyone could help with that i would greatly appreciate it. Also i'm not sure i get some of the previous comments... is there a way to increase the ram? Thanks

Quote
gamax92
I hope that this is of help to some people, and that this gets added to the main post or stickied.

Resize the disk image:
Note: Do not perform this operation on the linuxdsk.img EWL uses while it is running. Do it offline or on another copy.

Step One: expand the image.

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k count=1024 >> linuxdsk.img

In the above example, 1024k (bs) times 1024 (count) makes 1048576k (1GB) which gets added to linuxdsk.img resulting in a 2GB file. If you want to add more, repeat the command until desired size.
Remember, you MUST use >> on the above command.

Step Two: check the image.
resize2fs won't resize the filesystem until it is clean, so we have to force a check on it.

e2fsck -f linuxdsk.img

Step Three: resize the image.
After resizing the image, resize2fs shouldn't complain about the image being unclean, and resize to the new size.

resize2fs linuxdsk.img

If it does happen to tell you to check the disk again, repeat step two and then attempt to resize it. If it tells you to do it again, you can try to force it to resize:

resize2fs -f linuxdsk.img

Congrats! Your disk image should now be larger allowing for more program space. If this is still too small for you, you can attempt to do the program removal techniques by flits on the first page.

I attempted this under the Linux environment that exists in my Android phone (did an ADB shell command), those steps had absolutely NO effect on the linuxdsk.img copy I had put on the phone's SD card. What gives?

It is quite possible that Android does not include the necessary binaries. Android is not a full Linux installation, and as such does not include every tool that a regular Linux installation will include. My advice would be just do it on a regular Linux distro (run it in a virtual machine if you don't want to install as second OS on your computer just for this).

I should have specified that I was running CyanogenMod 7.1. That ROM actually had the tools necessary included, otherwise I would have gotten a "command not found" message. Each command actually responded and ran properly, there was just.....no effect on the file.

Just registered to post here and thank author for great release.

This topic must be pinned and mentioned in wiki.

update wifi is gone... (ill check iwconfig, looks like dhclient is not working)

P.S. I'll make small site with FAQ and my ideas how to use Linux on Wii (example: torrent server).



Edited 7 time(s). Last edit at 04/05/2013 08:57PM by romanov.

im trying to install it using a usb stick. can it be a FAT, or will the whole thing fail altogether?

I'm using this build but instead of using the kernel and .img as they are I decided to dd it to an ext2 partition and use it as a normal filesystem with Farter's vfb kernel. It works AWESOMELY well. Has to be the easiest way to get a Debian 6 installation. I've got a lot of space so I run XFCE and have moved swap to my external HDD.
Thanks for taking the time to set Squeeze up. I tried to upgrade my Lenny install but I got a lot of errors.
Might try upgrading this to Wheezy though... just to see if it will

I have downloaded the Linux folder twice now and the .elf file doesn't find necessary files in the .img file, and when I inspect the .img file on my computer, I get a message saying the file is corrupted. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Will the DVD function work on the newer Wii's?

Quote
nick141
I have downloaded the Linux folder twice now and the .elf file doesn't find necessary files in the .img file, and when I inspect the .img file on my computer, I get a message saying the file is corrupted. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Will the DVD function work on the newer Wii's?

I couldn't get it to work as an img either so I recommend doing what I did: use dd to extract the .img to your ext2 partition on your sdcard ("dd if=linux.img of=/dev/sdb2" - replace with your img & device names) then boot it with whatever kernel you like (I originally used Farter's kernel and it worked well) - just remember to extract Farter's modules to /lib/modules on your ext2 partiton.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/22/2013 09:38PM by fishears.

I need a Windows guide for that.

Quote
nick141
I need a Windows guide for that.

Like many things, this is not easy to accomplish in Windows - you'd need linux filesystem support as well as a clone of dd - both can be found on the web but its a whole lot easier if you download a LiveCD of something like Fedora or Ubuntu and then use it to perform the tasks in Linux.