Bootstrapping a Wii-Linux Distro

There's 4 or 5 stages to bootstrapping a Wii-Linux Distro, depending on the current state of the distro you'd like to bootstrap.

1. Porting the distro to 32-bit Big-Endian PowerPC 750, if required

This is obviously the hardest step. If the distro does not already natively support 32-bit PPC (e.g. Debian), or have a community-maintained port (e.g. ArchPOWER), or perhaps doesn't support PPC750, then you will need to create the port yourself. The difficulty of this step could range from Impossible (distro is set up in such a way to make this task 100% impossible), to very easy (most of the groundwork is already there, just needs to be compiled), to already done (such a port already exists).

Due to the incredible variety of difficulties that could be encountered in this step, accomplishing it will not be covered here, but here's some tips, if you do find yourself in this incredibly unfortunate situation:

• Work with other members of the PowerPC community. Maintainers or contributors of other projects that support 32-bit PPC (like ArchPOWER or Adélie) are often willing to help, share patches, etc.
• Establish a team of multiple people that are also interested in porting your target distro to 32-bit PPC.
• Try to get a minimum-viable-product built first, before trying to get anything more difficult. Tackle basic system utilities (coreutils, bash, util-linux), important applications (an init system), and important libraries (libc, libstdc++, readline) first, and see if you can get something booting.

2. Making sure that it boots correctly on the Wii

It's possible that the distro might not support Linux 4.5 correctly. If this is the case, and the things that are not supported are critical, then you may need to fall back to step 1, and rebuild those critical portions against older Linux headers.

It's also possible (modern versions of Debian are good examples of this) that the distro may need more than 88MB of RAM in order to boot. If this is the case, you'll need to mod the loader to enable swap before booting that distro.

It's also possible that the distro might not support PPC750, and requires PPC7400/"G4" or higher. If that's the case, you will need to rebuild the distro for PPC750 or under.

Assuming that none of those are an issue, it probably boots up mostly unscathed. Now, there's a few more things you'll want to check and/or fix:

• Are the kernel modules working?
  • Do necessary ones load automatically? If not, you may need to force some on startup. b43 is particular problematic for this.
• Is networking working properly?
  • Does the distro have any network management out of the box? If so, you'll want to add some.
  • Does the Wi-Fi card function properly?
    • If not, make sure that you added the openfwwf firmware.
    • Also, make sure that the b43 kernel module is loading, it sometimes doesn't by default.

If you've gotten all of these essentials working, you're ready to move onto step 3.

3. Adding Wii-specific customizations

After you have a successfully booting distro, you'll want to customize the system to be more well-suited to the Wii. Here's some ideas:

• Include the Wi-Fi firmware by default
• Build the kernel (+ modules) and loader as packages that can be seamlessly upgraded with the rest of the system
• Add detection for your distro to the loader
• Including networking and Bluetooth configuration utilities by default
• Port Wii-Linux applications like configmii and helpmii

4. Automating everything so far

Now that you have a fully working system, you'll want to automate all of the steps to get there. This will allow for easier updates in the future.

If you need an example of how to do this, the build script Wii-Linux uses to make ArchPOWER images is on GitHub.

5. Publicize it!

The final step - get your new distro out there so people can use it! There's 2 routes you could reasonably go with this, both of them are described here.

Get it hosted by the Wii-Linux project

Feel free to reach out! If your distro port is actually good, the Wii-Linux project will gladly host images for it, and provide (limited) build infrastrcture. Talk to us via any of the standard methods (e.g. Discord), and we can discuss possibilities.

Hosting it yourself

You'll need the following:

• VPS or dedicated machine
  • Ability to set up an HTTP server
  • Enough disk space to hold any required files
• Decent networking
  • Public, static IP address(es)
  • High speed (preferablly 100mbps or higher upload speed)
  • High uptime
• (optional, but highly recommended) domain name

You'll need to set up hosting for your built images, custom packages, and probably also a project homepage.