hello everybody and welcome back toanother video now in today's episodewe're going to be taking a look at theNintendo Wii everybody's favoriteNintendo console from 2006. and we'regoing to be screwing around with ittoday because we're going to attempt toinstall Linux on this console that'sright now I figured this was prettyappropriate because it was a year agothis month when I did the PlayStation 2Linux video using Sony's official PS2Linux kit this method we're going totake a look at on the Wii here iscertainly not official at all this wasnot a Nintendo sanctioned thing and it'sonly thanks to the work of some peoplein the Wii home brewing community thatwere even able to do this in the firstplace so yes if it wasn't alreadyobvious you have to have a home brewedWii with boot me installed and thenyou're also going to need an SD card anda USB flash drive the two things to makeany Homebrew project successful at leastin theory anyways but yeah let's goahead and swap over to my computer andwe'll get started with this alright sogetting Linux installed on the NintendoWii is actually relatively simple andI'm going to kind of walk you throughthat process here there are a couple ofdistros that you could use Believe It orNot we've got white or wheat perhaps ifyou're pronouncing it like the eyes andwe but whatever whites blight and xwhite now the difference between theseis uh what they're based on so whiteLinux is based on Deviant and blightLinux which is down here under thirdparty distros is based on gen 2. we'regoing to be using x white for this videobecause it is white Linux with a GUIit's got X included as well so we'rejust going to use that for this videobut theoretically you could use any ofthese three with the installer which isthe far easier method of installingLinux on the Wii you could go throughthe method of manually installing one ofthese other distros if you would preferto do that or just with white Linux orblight Linux or whichever one that youwant but it's definitely quite the uhordeal that you have to go through hereand they made this installer to justmake the process a lot easier so we'regoing to be taking a advantage of thatnow it should be noted that all of thisinfo is is really old over 10 years oldokay you saw like from the date here onwhich was at this page here uh thisversion was released in 2008 2009 sothis stuff is like pretty old but I didcome across this post over on GBA tempthat was posted in 2020 that is a guideon how to get x white Linux running onthe Wii and get Wi-Fi working which ispretty great we're going to try that outlater on in this video as well now youneed to have a home brewed Wii with bootme installed if you don't have a homebuild a Wii I'd recommend going over towe dot guide and following along withthe tutorial here once you get theHomebrew Channel and boot me installthen you can come back to this page andyou have to download a couple thingsfrom this MediaFire link there's 2.7zfiles in here and one of these has to goon your SD card one of them has to go onyour USB flash drive so we're going tostart with the SD card which should looksomething like this we're going to grabthe SD card card or the apps.7z fileright here and all you gotta do is gointo your apps folder on your SD card gointo the apps folder in here and extractthis folder into the apps folder on theSD card and that's all there is to itthis is the installer that we will runfrom The Homebrew Channel now going overto the USB drive which I have nothing onwe're going to open up the White fulllinux.7z file and just extracteverything to the root of the USB driveand there we go so what we have to donow is take the USB drive and SD cardout of our computer put them back intothe Wii and we have to open up theHomebrew Channel go through theinstaller and then once we're done withthat we have to take the SD card out ofthe Wii put it back into the computerdownload this elf file it is a pal filebut the guide says it doesn't matterapparently and then we have to replacethe PPC boot.elf inside of the boot mefolder on the SD card with that file andthen rename it ppcboot.elf and that willallow us to from The Homebrew Channelhit the home button select launch bootme and it will then boot into Linux solet's go ahead and try this all out andsee if it works alright so we've got theWii hooked up and everything set up theSD card USB drive plugged in it'simportant to note that the USB drive hasto be plugged into Port 0 which is thebottom USB port or the right one ifyou've got the console standing up sowe're going to go into the HomebrewChannel hereand we should have our single installerright here we're just going to run thatand click load now at this point youhave to plug in a USB keyboard to theother USB port so let me grab that andso it says right here it will erase thecontents of the SD card inserted so makesure you don't have anything that youdon't want to lose on it so we're goingto say yes and it says please don'tremove the SD card nor any USB storagedevice as the installer use thefollowing Source media and we can prettymuch go with the default options here itdefaults to 256 for the recommended sizeof the fat partition that's fine with uswe're just going to do that and now weget another warning box that says if youcontinue all the existing data in the SDcard will be erased so we say yes andnow it's untiring so everything looksgood so far it is mentioned in thetutorial that this will take a while sojust be prepared[Music]and the screen just went black but theconsole's still on should I hit a key onthe keyboard sure let's do that oh okayI just went to sleep but yeah so far onthe timer or the stopwatch rather we areabout eight minutes and and we'rehalfway done so that's not I mean 16minutes if it actually ends up beinglike 16 20 minutes that's not too bad[Music]thank youand there we go we're done it didn'teven take 15 minutes uh so that's prettygreat so we're going to hit OK to rebootthe video console all right and it saidthat it was copying over a PPC boot.elffile so I'm wondering if we even need tocopy over the version that was mentionedin that guide we're going to see becauseit said you can launch it right now fromThe Homebrew Channel solet's just try it and seeso the SD card has had the installerwipe so nothing's going to show up herebut we're going to press the home buttonand go down to launch boot me and we'llsee what happens yeah it's bootingand it just ejected the disk which isinteresting but yeah here it is it'sstarting the desktop manager so I wonderwhythe guide said that you needed to copyover that other elf file and by the waythis is all done off the SD card youdon't need to have the USB drive pluggedinto the Wii anymore so I've plugged amouse into the other USB port and yeahlet's view the about information sowe'll go about xfce and this is aversion four copyright 0206and yeah xfce 4 version 4.30.99.2 but yeah I mean here it is we'vegot the dock down here we've got ouricons on the desktop we've got ourmultiple desktops up here we have thiswhichI don't actually know what oh that's arestoring hidden Windows okay our hidewindows and show desktop all right andyeah so let's try to go this right hereis the menu which we can get to just byright clicking on the desktop as well sothis is the web browser it looks likealthough it says it failed to executedefault web browser input output errorwe're going to try in a minute here toget Wi-Fi working and I'm wondering ifthe other PPC boot.l file has somethingto do with that I'm not sure but I meanclearly we're here booted into Linuxwith xfce running just fine without thatother L file so the default one seems towork fine for for that purpose but yeahso we've got terminal hereum let's view our apps let's see what wegot so editors we've got mouse pad andNano got a few net tools there oh we'vegot Opera too okay well that's supernice can we launch Opera yeah it doesn'tuh does not appear to be launchingwhich sucksbut we also have Let's see we gotprogramming we got python bash and Sh uhsound we've got some sound stuff butyeah you've got a few things in here uhvarious tools we've got VLC which ispretty nice can we launch that you knowI wonder could you put a DVD in and likeplay like does it does it recognize thedisk drive I'm sure there's a bettersolution for playing DVDs back on theWii with like some other Homebrew appbut I'm wondering if like if it evenrecognizes the disk drive here alrightso quick jump cut here because I wantedto just talk a little bit more aboutthis PPC boot.elf file that I wasmentioning earlier because as it turnsout there is a very good reason why wehave to change out the file with the onethat the text tutorial guide mentionedand that's because the installer we usedinstalls version2.6.27 of the Linux kernel but thelatest version of the Linux kernel thatwas compiled for the Wii at leastthrough this project was2.6.32 and that's the version that iscontained in the elf file that the textguide points to it's known as the minikernel preview 5 and it contains someenhancements over previous versionsnotably it has experimental support forthe Wii's DVD drive and updated supportfor the Wii's Wi-Fi adapter so I wentahead and copied over that file to theSD card and replace the existing one andeven though the text guide claims itdoesn't matter if you use a pal or ntscversion of this file I just got the ntscversion because it was there and we'reon an ntsc console so it just seemedlike the right thing to do but anywayswith all of that said let's go ahead andjump into the Homebrew Channel again andwe will launch boot me from here and getback into the Linux environment and thenwe'll go through the process of tryingto get Wi-Fi working and we'll see ifthe web browser decides to launch thistime because it wasn't launching beforefor whatever reason both Opera andwhatever default or browser that it hadand yeah every time it starts up ittries to eject whatever disk is in thedrive of course there's nothing in therenow so it's not going to do anything butyeah here we are so we're going toimmediately I've got the text guidepulled up because it does go through aseries of terminal commands you have torun to uh get the Wi-Fi adapter workingso we're going to try that out and seeif that is doable but first let's justtry to launch the browser again and youknow see what happens so what browser isthis it's just called a web browserum I'm gonna guess well this is xfcethough yeah I don't know but yeah itsays input output error and we go to wego to apps hereand go to net and we go to Opera Iwonder what ice weasel is is this a webbrowser yeah iceweasel web browser sothat is that is another web browser ohthere we go it's starting up look atthat this looks like it's Firefox basedyeah this is definitely Firefox basedit's Mozilla 5.0 right here and yeahlet's uh let's just minimize this fornow the guide tells us to completely logout of the account we're logged into nowand then just log into the root accountI wonder what account we're logged intothough because we didn't make an accountor anything I guess there's some otheroh I don't want to shut down the Wiiokay shut down canceled you can log inall right so so we gotta log in as rootsand the password is whitew-h-i-i-t-e and there we go so now if wetype inum I was gonna say start act but I don'tbelieve it is startaxoh it is look at that the tutorial saysto type in start xfce4 but start X workstoo and yeah so now we're logged intothe root account and we've got this tipsand tricks thing that came up it doesn'tlook like there are any tips or tricksin here but anyways let's go to terminalhere and let's begin by typing what isour first command we have to changedirectory to the uh home slash we and wegotta run dpkg Dash I star Dot d-e-ball right so that's finished we gottachange directory back to the roots nowwe gotta run a tar commandthank God for being able to press tab toauto complete and now we have to runNano to edit a configuration fileEtc networkinterfacesand this shows you how rudimentary thatthis is because we have to type in theSSID and password into here then wegotta get out of that we want to say yesSave Right to that and there we go soyeah there's no like uh you know Networksearch program or interface of any kindin this like is there anything insettings for Network like there's thesettings manager okay you got keyboardmouse file manager display okay well wecan change the display settings at leastuh there's only one uh resolution thatwe can pick from 320 by 240. but yeahthere's nothing in here about you knownetwork uh so let's just see if we areon the network let's try to open up thatbrowser that actually opened up which ishere under uh net iceweasel and let'shope that well actually I guess we couldjust go to terminal here and try to runa pingunknown host that is not a good sign youknow I wonder do I wonder if we gottarestart that would that would actuallymake sense failed to bring up wlan0 ohgosh okay so the Wii account is thedefault account that it makes okay pinggoogle.com unknown host all right sowe're Force powering off the Wii againbecause I have just temporarily changedmy Wi-Fi network to use WPA and WPA2instead of just solely WPA2 keyword istemporarily so we're going to try thisagain once the network comes back onlineand we will see if it's just thesecurity protocol that's causing theissue but again the we can connect to itjust fine without it being set to WPAand WPA2 but I'm guessing maybe we Linuxis is not that way I was thinking oftrying to use the Wii's ethernet adapterbecause I have one of those because I'vetried to do Network stuff on the Wiibefore you guys may remember back in2021 we tried to use some third-partyweb browsers on this thing and thatfailed in utter disaster but as a resultof that I I have a the wheeze USB wiredNetwork ethernet module I don't know whyI just made that too long yeah uh I havethat but it doesn't specifically mentionthat that is supported on the Wiki pageabout this at least from what I've readbut we can try it anyway because I'vegot a network switch right here that wecould hook this up to and honestly Imuch prefer ethernet for everythingbecause it's just so much moreconvenient and uh of course when youhave access to easy access to anEthernet Jack okay it failed to bring upET failed to bring up WLAN zero done ohmy God reallyreally maybe I entered the passwordwrong or something oh I think I see theproblem this is supposed to be WLAN oneapparently and it's supposed to say Iface WLAN one instead of WLAN zero somaybe it's not even a WPA2 issue butokay so we're going to get out of thatyes we want to save yes we want to writeto that file okay okay that's lookinggood authenticating so now I should beable to terminals come up here let'sping google.com oh there we go six yeslet's go we're online people oh my goshthat is beautiful all right so let's goback into Apps here let's go to netlaunch that ice weasel web browser uhwe're gonna start new session yes I knowthe last session closed unexpectedlythat may have been because we forcepowered off the system and let's try togo to google.comnot DOT CM not google.cm well that alsoworks but google.com of course you knowthis is a super freaking old web browserso it's not going to be able to displaymodern Pages properly so you knowGoogle's displayed in this like 2006mode here but I don't know you want todo a search we could search for uhMichael mjd this will probably bring upthe mobile results page that usuallyalways happens uh yes continue that'sfine yep there we go we're not going tobe able to go to YouTube at all on thisthing but we can try well that answersthat so we're just gonna go to the oldnote gosh it's always good to see theold nap so let's try to go to hey that'sappropriate nintendo.com let's go tonintendo.com in 2008 and see what theywere up to back then it looks like it'sdisplayed this page relatively wellum so it looks like Wii music wascoming out around this time experiencewe experience Nintendo DS KirbySuperstar Ultra Man World of Goo oh mygosh that was a pretty fun game I playedit on the Wii first I think it was adownload on the Wii Shop Channel I thinkit was we wearum and then I ended up getting it for uhPC later on like many years lateractually Nintendo's holiday 2008 wespeak Channel Club Nintendo Morrison ohgosh remember Club Nintendo Wii remotejacket accessory offer it's back whenthat was going on 2008 was actually theyear that my family got a Nintendo Wiiyeah we kind of got it we didn't get in2006 when it first came out as much as Iwanted it back then but we ended upgetting it a couple years later which uhwhich was pretty great and uh gosh itwas it was a pretty fun console just tobe able to like mess around with there'sso so much stuff to do on it it justseemed like a whole new world at thetime but yeah so that is web browsingwe're online which is great I actuallywant to go to the package manager toobecause that was in here under apps uhtools I believeI don't know was it under system yeahhere it is so we'll launch the packagemanager because I want to see what's inhere we gotta type in the root passwordokay I'd be curious to see what uh showsup in here so we've got a bunch ofcategories 3D chess uh yeah let's get 3Dchess why not Mark for installation Iwonder how much of this stuff would likework on here this needs to be like waysmaller this box here on the bottomlet's resize that maybe oh can it not beresized any more than that oh it can'toh that's annoying reallyoh that sucks so this is how large thatthe package like selection window is uhor part of the window anywayso let's see if oh my gosh you know whatif is on here oh we can just searchfrom here let's do that there we goall right so we'll mark that forinstallation to be installed so weshould have 3D chess and all thestuff it needs all right that's fine forus and let's let it download hooray sowe've got now on the Nintendo Wiithe question now of course is can weactually open it up welcome to the2.2 and the window is too freaking largeit goes off the screen so we'll have touh minimize or not minimize but likerestore it there we'll hit continue wegotta do the same thing herefor proper uh installation the foldernamed uh game 2.0 needs to be createdokayum I I want to like get to yeah continue128 megabyte tile cache size it looksfine to meoh boy look at that splash screen wow[Laughter]oh my gosh it's actually working I Iactually I shouldn't jinx myself itmight crash oh boyoh my gosh here it is everybody so ifyou've ever asked yourself huh I'd I'dwonder if you could run on theNintendo Wii well the answer is yes youabsolutely can uh through this reallyconvoluted and uh just something thatyou should never like there's no reasonto do any of this there's far betterways of running but it is I mean II have to say it is pretty cool thatwe've got it running on the Wii here sowe'll make a really basic 420 by 300file that's fineand we'll just I don't know yeah it's sowith the resolution being so low wecan't even fit everything on thefreaking screenum what do we want to do fill with acolor gradient yeah that that soundsgood to me and let's maybe draw somestuff on it let's maybe uh let's go hereand get a larger thing and and do thisand maybe select the different uh colorlet's maybe get a nice like red going on[Music]mjd uh and I don't know you want to likefill something up I don't know why I'masking you guys as if you could tell mewhat we're doingum let's maybe uh get a blue hereand hit OK and let's maybe uh fill thatup yeah that looks that looks amazingokay so we're gonna save this utterMasterpiece let's just do it as aXTF image that's fine lovely absolutelylovely okay so that's that's thepackage manager you saw there's a decentamount of stuff in there that we couldinstall and that's web browsing theother thing I would like to answer iscan we put a DVD into the Nintendo Wiithat has a video file on it I've copiedone of my video files over to this DVDand you know formatted it properly towhere you can put this into a DVD playerand it'll play so let's pop it in andfirst off let's just see if anythingcomes up on the desktop but I am goingto open up VLCthe drive doesn't appear to be doinganything there's no activity going on solet's open up VLC[Music]and we have GM player on here too and wecould try that okay and let's go to fileopen disk let's just go with thedefaults and hit OK and play we've gotno Drive activitydrive is not doing anything now it didmention this had there was experimentalsupport for the Wii's DVD drive and itdidn't say anything about playing likeDVDs through VLC I'm just trying thisout but it's definitely not looking goodhere device name what was it device nameDVD device to useumyeah I don't even know I don't even knowwhat that would be I mean nothing isshowing up on the desktop here if we gointo file system yeah we got nothing inhere oh and also of note when you put adisc into the wheeze drive you can't hitthe eject button that does not doanything when you're booted into Linuxhere so I don't think we can even ejectthe thing we could try the other mediaplayer here oh boy does this remind youof something uh so let's umlet's go here and can we just rightclickokay open play DVD fail to open DVD oneokay well that ain't good so yeah it'slooking like uh the DVD drive may nothave been fully supported at this pointbut still this is pretty freakingawesome like let's be real I mean justgetting Linux working on the Wii byitself is pretty cool but getting it onthe network that's even better so thisexperiment was a total success and I'mreally happy that everything actuallywent right for once I mean of course youcould say that the DVD thing somethingdid go wrong of course it's an mjd videogonna happen but I'm definitely reallyhappy with this and uh yeah it's justit's just pretty cool that peopleactually took the time to to get Linuxworking on the Wii even though you knowthere's no real practical reason forthis other than just to say we did itand it's cool so yeah that's gonna wrapit up for this video guys I hope youenjoyed this one if you did be sure togive it a thumbs up get subscribed allthat good stuff and as always I want tothank you all so much for watching and Iwill see you in the next video[Music]