Debian Installer for Wii

Step by step installation guide

Debian Installer, despite its simplistic interface, is designed to be both very user-friendly and very robust. Most people will have little to no difficulty using i386/amd64 versions of Debian Installer on a normal AMD/Intel computer or a virtual machine, which is good practice for people new to Linux. This part will mainly focus on quirks specific to Wii, using Lenny installer as an example, with screenshots of the key steps. Most of the time, all you have to do is wait and make a few occasional choices. If you are curious as to what is going on behind the scenes, press ‘Alt-F4’. Press ‘Alt-F1’ to get back to Installer GUI.

Select Language

Select Language

The first screen of Installer lets you choose the language used during the installation. It is advised to select ‘English’ for best results, even though Installers for Squeeze and higher offer many choices, most likely including your native one. After the installation is complete, you will still be able to change to a different language with ease anyway.

Modules Not Found

Modules Not Found

You will be warned that no kernel module package can be found. Just select ‘Yes’ and move on. Module installation will be performed manually towards the end of installation (see next section).

Network Hardware

Network Hardware

The Installer will then attempt to establish network connection. USB wifi/LAN adapters should be automatically recognized, if they are supported. Wii’s native wifi needs to be manually selected. In the above screen, scroll down to ‘b43’ and press ‘Enter’.

If network hardware is working, the Installer will try to use DHCP to obtain IP address, and should that fail, prompt for manual configuration. If wifi is being used, you will be prompted for SSID and WEP password. There is nothing special here.

The Installer will then pop warnings about default partition type and lvm being unavailable etc. Just ignore these and ‘Continue’.

Partition Disks

Partition Disks

In almost all cases, you should select ‘Manual’ in this screen.

SD Card Not Found

SD Card Not Found

Next, the Installer will let you choose where to install Debian. Due to some unknown bugs in the MINI version of Installer, the front slot SD card may not get listed, as in the above screenshot. In this case, you will have to press ‘Tab’ to highlight ‘Go Back’ and return to the Installer main menu:

Re-detect Disks

Re-detect Disks

Select ‘Detect disks’ and press ‘Enter’ to make the Installer search for disks again. It seems that removing the SD card before pressing ‘Enter’ and inserting the card again after the detecting process has begun usually help. This process can be repeated until the card is found:

SD Card Found

SD Card Found

or you can try installing to USB storage device.

Root Partition

Root Partition

Swap Partition

Swap Partition

'Whiite-style' Partition Scheme

‘Whiite-style’ Partition Scheme

The partition scheme of the SD card or USB storage device can be anything you want, if you really know what you are doing. For those less acquainted with Linux file system organization, it is probably best to just follow the ‘Whiite-style’: first partition of SD card formated as FAT, and not used in Debian; second partition formated as EXT2, used in Debian as root filesystem and mounted at ‘/’; third partition used as swap area. You can format the FAT partition using the Installer, or do it later in Windows/Linux. This partition will hold the files required to boot the installed Debian in HBC or Bootmii.

Writing Changes to Disk

Writing Changes to Disk

After the partitions are all set up, select ‘Yes’ to write the changes to device and if there is no error in this process, the Installer will go on to extract and install a base system, which will take quite some time. The screen will go black after some time to save power. Press any key to activate display.

Towards the end of base system installation, warnings will be displayed about ‘no boot loader’ and ‘no installable kernel’, which you should ignore and choose to continue. You will also get a chance to set root password and create a normal user.

Select Mirror Country

Select Mirror Country

Select Mirror Server

Select Mirror Server

If you have network connection working during the installation, you will be prompted to select apt mirror servers.

Select Software

Select Software

You will also get the chance to select and install certain meta-packages, such as ‘Desktop environment’ and ‘Standard system’, etc. It is probably better to do this manually later to avoid ending up with a bloated installation with many packages you probably do not need.

Installation Complete

At the end of the installation process, you will see this screen. Do NOT select ‘Continue’ yet, because we still have unfinished business before rebooting into Debian.

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75 Responses to Debian Installer for Wii

  1. DeltaLink says:

    Good news everyone, I’ve managed to track down most of the issues with my highly optimized 2.6.32.60 GC/Wii Linux Kernel and have recently made the repository pubic. It can be found on Github at: “https://github.com/DeltaResero”. Due to something I overlooked, the repository may have to be moved, but even if does, I’ll still keep it under the same name in the link. Within the next 6 months, I hope to have another repository set up for a 3.0 (and above) kernels and a page with a few compiled Kernels as I was mostly successful in porting this as well (GPIO breaks). While this 2.6.32.60 repository still suffers from the accept4 issue I previously mentioned, my 3.0 Kernel doesn’t. I would definitely be interested in a 3.0 Wheezy installer once I make the 3.0 patch public, if this is possible.

  2. kimotori says:

    Hi,
    I suggest a little help.
    in /etc/inittab
    1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
    2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
    3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
    4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
    5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
    6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6

    put a comment

    1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
    2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
    #3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
    #4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
    #5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
    #6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6

    the Wii, will thank you. 🙂
    bye

    • farter says:

      That depends on your needs. If two ttys are enough for you, it’s ok. But you might need multiple tty consoles simultaneously for debugging or development. Either way, the memory saved or wasted won’t make that much difference.

  3. DeltaLink says:

    It seems that 2.6.32.60 was just recently released and has quite a few bug fixes, so I’ll try to make some time for building a custom kernel. After taking a look through the sources and the default Wii Linux configuration, it should be quite easy to build one with some backports and bug fixes from recent kernels. I’ll post here (hopefully in the next few days) regarding my findings, but in theory I should be able to free up about 3MB of RAM from the kernel just by removing non essentials such as kernel debugging; as well as about another 10MB and possibly some CPU usage with some tweaks and patches.
    Also, when building kernels, I get warnings from what seems to be the deffered I/O patch (“/drivers/video/gcnfb.c”). I get warnings such as “unused variable ‘adr’ ” (from line 286 in patch)”. I’m not sure why this was here originally, but it seems it can be removed. In total there are 5 other warnings generated by this in recent kernels, but they have no effect on building.

    • farter says:

      warnings about unused variables usually don’t matter, because they are unused.

    • DeltaLink says:

      Also, line 297 should be: ” “virtual framebuffer at 0x%p, size %luk\n” “, (the “d” was replaced by “lu”). The kernel seems to compile without the extra functions, “vifb_mmap” and “vifb_pan_display”, I’m not sure if these are needed, but I can’t find any calls to them elsewhere else. So that just leaves the “ISO C90 forbids mixed declarations and code” warning, I not sure what this means.

      • farter says:

        It means variable declarations should be placed at the beginning of file/function, separate from actual code. No real harm.

        • DeltaLink says:

          Just a quick update, I have everything working in the kernel, but after Kubuntu 120.10 upgraded I seemed to have lost the ability to mount external JFS drives (like the one containing the kernel patches I was working on) and my system is completely unstable for me. I guess I’ll have to aim for next weekend instead. It may be wise for me to start using Github in the near future…

          • farter says:

            Newer userspace will have more and more trouble working with old kernels, that is expected.

          • DeltaLink says:

            Sorry for the lack of contact with everyone, since October with hurrican Sandy, my priorities have changed and my internet usage has been sparse to say the least. I will resume with what I left off with in October after Christmas.

            By the way, the nearly endless udev error messages caused in running Debian Wheezy/Sid with the 2.6.32 kernels are caused by the lack of an accept4 system call. Unfortanetly the only solutions currently are to patch udev or with a kernel patch (doesn’t exist for powerpc yet) or to use udev versions under 170 (breaks a few packages).

          • DeltaLink says:

            I’m just going to post in the forms here from now on due to my post mostly no longer showing up here. By the way, the optimized Kernel I’ve been working on is now finished and I’ve attempted to post more info in the form under the Linux on Wii topic.

  4. Paul says:

    Hi !

    I’ve a little pb, my wii stuck at this line and seem to have freezed

    0.172570 irq:irq 2 on host /soc/pic0@003000 mapped to virtual irq 19

    Installation was made with your netinstall iso (sd with fat32[1] swap [2] ext3 as /[3] and a usb on the 2.0 as /home)
    I’ve tested all the elf files (the d ones, not the d-i ) with bootmii (by renaming ppcboot.elf) and by the Ios
    Same shit happens.

    Sorry for bad english.

    Regards, Paul the frenchy.

    • farter says:

      Can’t say much about that freezing line, but i’m guessing it most likely is not what is wrong.

      With your partition setup, you will have to “manually hexedit the ‘root=’ kernel commandline argument in the kernel files”. If you already did this, make sure you did not change the filesize in the process.

  5. DeltaLink says:

    To clarify, what I mean is, is there’s a new version than JOVI and HAXX? I’m using version 1.1.0 and cannot find what the code name/id name is for it.

    • farter says:

      Yes, there is. They changed it to sth non-ASCII to circumvent Nintendo firmware check. You probably would have to search on wiibrew wiki/forum for the acutal hex code.

      • DeltaLink says:

        Thanks, this was all that was missing. In the mikep5 patch, I added the lines “define STARLET_TITLE_HBC_V107 0x00010001AF1BF516ULL” ( for starlet-ios.h) and “starlet_es_reload_ios_and_launch(STARLET_TITLE_HBC_V107);” (for wii.c) near where HAXX and JODI are mentioned.

        Also I found out why there was an ohci.h error occurring in patching recent 2.6.32 series kernels. Why the error occured was due to an extra line added in to prevent a Nvidia power bug that’s not in the mikep5 patch. This can easily be fixed by editing the extra line into the patch. If for some reason this does not work with future 2.6.32 series kernels, it seems that replacing ohci.h and ohci-hcd with older original versions of themselves (such as the ones from 2.6.32.9) seem to work without major errors. I only recommend this second way as a last alternative as it is prone to errors. Also, most of the other warnings when cross compiling regarding various variables being unused have been queued to kernel 2.6.32.60. Maybe this will lead to a minor memory gain.

        • farter says:

          I would think most 2.6.32 updates nowadays are related to security instead of performance. So if it takes too much work, you could just stick with the easier-to-compile old kernels.

          • DeltaLink says:

            Your right about it being mostly security fixes and not performance impovements, but I found some patches that may greatly reduce memory usage with these recent kernels. I still need to do some more testing, one of them seems to be causing a memory leak somewhere.

            Right now, I’m just debating on whether or not to use an initrd. Why do kernels have an initrd (initial ramdisk) anyway? Other than RAID compatibility and maybe a slight boost in initial I/O speeds, is there a reason why this should be included or does it not really matter much. From what I understand, this is just a 300kb penalty for a slight i/o boost during boot.

          • farter says:

            initrd is usually optional if your rootfs is not peculiar and directly mountable by kernel.

  6. DeltaLink says:

    In the GC-Linux patch, I found “#define STARLET_TITLE_HBC_JODI 0x000100014A4F4449ULL”, “starlet_es_reload_ios_and_launch(STARLET_TITLE_HBC_JODI)” and their HAXX counterparters. At first, I thought it was named HAXX, so I left it. I am unable to find the id/name of the current 1.1.0 version. How is this normally found, I tried searching Google but could not find it?

  7. DeltaLink says:

    I think I might finally be making some progress as I’m now able to successfully build a working kernel. I solved most of my problems by just running “fsck /dev/sdCardMountPoint -f” on the various partitions, it seems “fsck” alone wasn’t enough. I found out that most of the I/O errors caused while in MINI are probably from an old unsolved bug in Debian operating systems (effects certain SDHC cards at random during read/write). The wireless patch that I asked about before had no effect, although using a different 2.6.32 series kernel seemed to fix this. Due to these bugs, I’ve decided to build an IOS kernel. The only problem is, when I reboot, my IOS kernels always reboot the Wii (no matter which version) rather than to the Homebrew Channel like it should. The GC-Linux mikep5 patch and your deffered I/O patch, are the only ones that I’ve been applying so far. I’ve been using the configuration (.config) from your kernel here too. I have not been successful in compiling any working external modules yet (mostly due to lack of time), so I rebuilt the same kernel using 2.6.32.43 with your configuration so your compiled modules would work with it, but this had no effect on solving the reboot issue. I did not attempt to add an initrd image, but this should not effect it from what I understand. Did you apply other patches or add a flag to activate this when compiling somehow, your IOS kernel reboots to the Homebrew Channel?

    Also, I just noticed that you have a forum for here. Sorry if my post are getting excessive and making a mess. I don’t know if it matters to you or not, but if your able to delete or move them, I don’t mind as it seems these post have been taking up more room than your actual blog.

    • farter says:

      The reboot issue is due to the ‘newest’ HBC updating its channel name. You can search the kernel patch for JODI to see where to change.

      It really does not matter whether you use this blog or the forum. Since wordpress sends automatic email notification, I usually reply faster here.

  8. DeltaLink says:

    I forget to ask earlier, how did you compile your kernel modules and firmware files (your lib folder in the download)? It seems after compiling a native kernel with GNU make, all that’s created are .o files, not .ko for modules and the firmware is in hexadecimal format. If my understanding of modules is correct, than my custom kernel will not be compatible with the modules/firmware you provided as they are different versions.
    Also, MINI bootloaders you provided (like official ones) all seem to have multiple I/O output warning that seem to be related to the wireless card. I get warnings in TTY during startup and shutdown such as “multiple chipcommon found”. Do you know of any patches or workarounds other than possibly disabling printk? The closest fix I could find using google was a BRCM4716 patch, but I’m quite sure this isn’t going to help (link is in my name).

    • farter says:

      Kernel building is not like simple software building. You must provide various options to build the correct files. See geexbox for wii sources (packages/linux/build and install) for examples. Kernel version checking can be overridden in kernel config, and maybe at runtime too.

      I don’t remember seeing the wifi errors you describe. On the other hand, native wifi only barely works in MINI to begin with. The patch you referred to may or may not help, but you can try.

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