Tuesday, August 26, 2008

August 26th, 2008 - I have the GameCube on my hands

echo hi

Today my friend Memo sold me a nice black GameCube in very good conditions, he is also giving me the Metroid Prime disc next tuesday. My objective is to add this console to the cluster after installing a modchip on it to boot gcLinux miniDVD's and I will also buy the GameCube Broadband Adapter (GC-BBA for short) to connect this node to the cluster's network.

As I have seen the GC-BBA is rare in ebay or in other sites, but I'm still geting one in good condition to plug it to the GC and add Network connectivity to it

I believe that's all for this post.

byte[] && EOT

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

August 13th 2008 - This blog is not dead !!!

printf("hi");

Whoa, It's been so long since I haven't posted anything on this blog.

As many of you know we just started classes again, during the vacations period I used the PS2 like a normal user (I had a lot of fun playing Resident Evil, Need for Speed and Metal Gear Solid on it) I booted up a couple times in linux and (finally) installed the BlackRhino distribution on it.

The kernel is still being quite (too) old here in BlackRhino, there is no X server leaving the system in console mode, it is no as bad as it sounds (if you got ued to console mode installing gentoo or if you've rescued your system when you accidentally removed the X server lol)

I did some research of running GNU/Linux on other game consoles:
  • Sega DreamCast: Runs its LinuxDC distro
  • Nintendo GameCube: stable release gcLinux
  • Microsoft XBOX: stable releases Xebian, gentooX and some others...
  • Nintendo Wii:
  • Microsoft xbox360: testing releases debian-etch, ubuntu7.04 and 7.10
  • Sony PlayStation 3: Well what can I say about this super computer... it runs Linux (YellowDog,Ubuntu,Debian,Gentoo,...)
I also learned some gimp while making a poster for the project's home page, give me some feedback if you like it or not



After seeing the videos hosted on the free60 project's page I was a little disapointed of knowing the PS2 is not a very good platform to run linux on. In fact I realized of this the time when I saw no updates to the system, leaving it in a 2.2 kernel based system WITH NO USB MASS STORAGE DRIVER, NOR AN ALTERNATE NETWORK DRIVER such as pegasus-II, the drivers may be ported, but as I read in some pages it's too difficult to make a new kernel for the ps2, starting with the cross-compiling part.

Given the fact the PS2 is the only game console which runs a pre 2.6 kernel I deceided to drop its integration into the cluster processing, I'm not dropping the entire support on it, it can be a web server or something else and still be integrated in other parts of the project.

Well, this large post is the synthetized part of what I did related to this project during summer vacations.

byte[] && EOT