WiiToo!

WiiToo!
General
Author(s)	Vquicksilver
Type	Operating system
Version	20 October 2009
Links
Download
Website

WiiToo! is a minimal precompiled stage4 made to let you run Gentoo on your Wii using MIKE and Mini. It provides all the basic software required to compile and install new programs on it, and some other software ready to be used. The kernel used is plain vanilla-sources & Wii-Linux patches, so expect WiFi working out of the box.

Features

• Ready to use, uncompress, copy, configure and run
• Highly configurable, like Gentoo
• USB keyboard isn't a requirement, simply configure your network and use SSH
• Can use all the hardware that Wii-Linux is able to use:

Hardware	Status
Non-accelerated 2D video hardware	Correct RGB framebuffer support requires a special SDL library port
Audio hardware	Works
SDHC and Non-SDHC SD cards in SD mode	Works via the front SD card slot
Serial interface (SI)	Nintendo GameCube controllers, and WaveBird wireless controllers works
MEM2 memory as normal RAM	Works, requires a module to be loaded
Internal USB Bluetooth dongle	Works
Nintendo Wii Remote and related expansion accessories	Works
Sensor Bar	Works
USB 1.x and 2.0 devices	Works, 1.x devices can have some problems
Internal wireless network card	Works, can maintain rates up to 200KB
SRAM/RTC	Works
Nintendo GameCube memory cards	Doesn't work
Internal DVD drive	Doesn't work

Requirements

For running it you will need:

• SD Card, like any other you can use with your wii, 1GB or more is required
• USB keyboard & TV or simply a local network connection, to be able to login in the system, input commands, etc

Installation

From a Linux

Making partitions on your SD card

The recommended partitioning scheme it's the whiite-linux scheme, else you will have to edit /etc/fstab and the boot parameters on the kernel image with a hexeditor.

Backup all the data on the SD card, before starting, or you will lose it.

Now put your SD card on the reader, find the corresponding device file on /dev, mine is /dev/mmcblk0, (Tip: See dmesg output if you are on linux) and umount any partition that can be mounted (Check with df). Now use fdisk to create a primary fat16 partition (this will be our boot partition), 30M should be enough for WiiToo! kernel images + bootmii, but if you are going to use another homebrew apps, or to store data from your Wii, make it bigger. Finally create the partition for the root filesystem (the bigger the better :D), exit fdisk, and unplug the SD card.

Becoming super user

$ su

an alternative is using sudo, you must put sudo at the start of the commands that start with #, the commands that start with $ can be run as a normal user.

Creating the filesystems

# /sbin/mkfs.vfat -n boot /dev/mmcblk0p1

# /sbin/mkfs.ext3 -L whiite /dev/mmcblk0p2

Creating mountpoints and mounting the filesystems

# mkdir /mnt/wiiroot /mnt/wiiboot

# mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/wiiboot

# mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /mnt/wiiroot

Installing WiiToo! on SD card

To uncompress you need xz-utils:

$ xz -d /path/to/wiitoo.tar.xz

# tar xpf /path/to/wiitoo.tar -C /mnt/wiiroot/

From a Windows

Maybe you can try with cygwin, or using a GNU/Linux livecd like sysrescuecd.

Final steps

Finally we configure some openrc settings, and the network.

Configuring openrc

Openrc is the init system used in Gentoo, we have to setup clock and other settings.

To setup the clock create /mnt/wiiroot/etc/timezone and set the path relative to your timezone for example:

America/New_York

You can view all available timezones exploring /mnt/wiiroot/usr/share/zoneinfo.

Configuring the network

WiiToo! includes all the software needed to make your wifi connection work on the first boot without the need to install any more software, it includes the firmware necessary to make the internal wifi card work out of the box, but you have to configure wpa_supplicant to fit your network needs.

To configure wpa_supplicant you have to edit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf, you can get lots of documentation about how to do it on google, anyway here you can see a WPA-PSK example:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel

eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1
country=ES
network={
   ssid="ExampleSSID"
   proto=WPA
   key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
   psk="YouWillNeverKnowTheSecretThatIdontShow"
   pairwise=CCMP TKIP
   group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
   priority=5
}

Then configure /etc/conf.d/net to use dhcp:

config_wlan0=( "dhcp" )

or a static ip:

config_wlan0="192.168.1.37 netmask 255.255.255.0 brd 192.168.1.255"
routes_wlan0="default via 192.168.1.100"

Booting the system

Install bootmii beta3 or higher

Choose your kernel image

You must choose your kernel image according to your TV (PAL/NTSC/480/576), WiiToo! provides 5 kernel images that can be found on /boot/ on the root partition.

When you have the correct kernel image just copy it to your boot partition on the SD card and use bootmii to load it. You must see something like this if you have the TV on:

Logging to your system

You can logging to your system with SSH:

ssh -l wii ip.address.ofyour.wii

or simply you can use a USB keyboard.

The predefined user for your system is Wii with password Wii, and to log as root your name is root and password root. Change your passwords after logging to do it, read the next section.

Configuring your system

After booting your system, you can configure some settings:

Changing your root password

You MUST change your root password if you want a secure system, to change it just run:

# passwd root

and follow the instructions.

Changing the Wii user password or adding a new user

Just run:

$ passwd wii

if you prefer to add a new user you can do:

# userdel wii

to erase the wii default user and then:

# useradd -m -G users,wheel,audio -s /bin/bash john

# passwd john

to add a user called john.

glibc locales

With this setting you can control the language of your system, charsets etc... don't touch it if you don't know what you are doing. To edit locales you can run:

# nano -w /etc/locale.gen

and when it's done run:

# locale-gen

Hostname

The default system hostname is "Wii", you can change it just doing:

# nano -w /etc/conf.d/hostname

and put an original name like "Hermenegildo" :D.

keymaps

Gentoo uses /etc/conf.d/keymaps to handle keyboard configuration. Edit it to configure your keyboard.

# nano -w /etc/conf.d/keymaps

Credits

Thanks to all the people that have contributed in any way to this project, special thanks to Gentoo, Team Twiizers, and isobel without them this wouldn't be possible.