Adélie Linux

Adélie Linux is a newer, simplicity-oriented distro that is quite fast. It’s the only distro linux-wiiu is aware of, other than Gentoo, with upstream support for PowerPC; and is critically the only distro with SMP support. Since it’s a newer distro though, some software simply isn’t available yet.

Downloads

Download the SD files, then your choice of Flashable Image, Partition Image or Tarball. The torrent cotains everything, so be sure to deselect undesired files in your torrent client before starting the download.

The linux-wiiu project has a large server seeding these images, so please use torrent if you can.

The dates are not particularly relevant here, since Adélie can update itself from the internet. Once you have downloaded your image, proceed with the Install guide.

Basic Setup

There are two default user accounts; user wiiu with password wiiu and user root with password wiiu. You will be required to change the password on first login.

User Account

The first thing you might want is your own user account, rather than using root all the time.

  1. First, create the account with useradd -s /bin/zsh -m -G input,video,wheel steve (you can replace steve with any username). The input and video groups will be useful for graphical programs, and wheel will allow us to use sudo later when we install it.
  2. Set the password with passwd steve.

Your new account will be ready to use and can be logged into on another tty (Ctrl-Alt-F2). You can get back to your root shell with Ctrl-Alt-F1, where we’ll continue.

Hostname

A nice bit of customisation is the hostname, by default wiiu. Set it to anything with echo anything > /etc/hostname. reboot to see the change. I like to name mine after eeveelutions :)

You must also update the hosts file with nano /etc/hosts and add the hostname after localhost. For example, if you chose adelie as your hostname:

127.0.0.1       localhost adelie
::1             localhost adelie

This prevents lookup delays (~2s freezes) in programs like sudo and X11.

Getting online

At the time of writing, Wi-Fi is not supported under linux-wiiu. You’ll need to use a USB ethernet dongle, tether an Android phone over USB, or a USB Wi-Fi adapter. (Bluetooth and iPhone tethering are also possible, but not documented here.)

Verify the existence of your network device with ip l. This is a Wii LAN adapter:

3: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:19:fd:00:00:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

This is an Android device with USB tethering enabled:

4: usb0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 01:23:45:00:00:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

USB Wi-Fi isn’t shown here since it’s a bit complex. See ArchWiki’s Network configuration/Wireless page.

NetworkManager is installed and running by default - you can run nmcli to confirm this. Your interfaces should be configured automatically once they’re detected. Run ping linux-wiiu.org to see if you’re online!

Timezone and date

If you run date, it’s likely the time will be wrong, which will prevent downloading system updates and other files. First we’ll change the timezone away from UTC - rm /etc/localtime, then ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Sydney /etc/localtime. You can press tab after zoneinfo/ to see a list of options. Now running date will show the correct timezone.

Then we can change the date itself with date -s "2024-07-12 19:57" (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm, in 24hr time).

Updates

You can fetch updates with apk update, then install them with apk upgrade. Rebooting after an update is strongly recommended.

Sudo

apk add sudo. Then, we need to say who can use sudo! Run EDITOR=nano visudo (or use another editor of your choice), find the line which says “Uncomment to allow members of group wheel to execute any command”, and uncomment (delete the #) from the next line down. If using nano, save and exit with Ctrl-X, then Y, then Enter.

The user account you made before now can use sudo to run setup commands, so now’s a good time to switch to it :)

Xorg

Install a basic X environment: apk add xorg-server xf86-input-libinput xf86-video-fbdev xinit xterm openbox ttf-dejavu ttf-liberation

This will give you the startx command, but without any application to run, it just quits immediately. Let’s run xterm, a terminal, and openbox, which will give you “windows”.

Edit .xinitrc with nano ~/.xinitrc, then type:

xterm &
exec openbox-session

Save and exit (remember, Ctrl-X for nano), then run startx. You should get a white terminal with a titlebar, mouse and keyboard support! This is a basic Xorg environment and is suitable for lots of graphical applications.

If you want to learn about customising openbox further, check out ArchWiki’s openbox page.

To quit Xorg, right-click on the blank part of the screen, and select “Log out”.

Optional extras

You’re set up for basic use, but how about some fun?

Desktop environments

Openbox is fun and minimal, but you might want a more complete desktop experience. You have plenty to choose from. The core idea is to install a desktop with apk, then replace openbox-session with the new environment in your .xinitrc file. Refer to the Xorg section above for how to edit that file.

OpenTTD

OpenTTD is a game about buses, trains, ships, and planes - but mostly trains. You can install it with sudo apk add openttd. Use some special flags to help it run smoothly: openttd -b 8bpp-optimized -s null -m null -r 800x600. Running from a tty (not Xorg) dramatically improves performance and you can try resolutions up to 1280x720. Note that Adélie ships a fairly old version of the game that still supports SDL1 - the ability to run under a tty may be lost if they ever update to an SDL2 version of the game.

Java (Minecraft server)

sudo apk add openjdk8-jre. This is Java 8, so good enough for Minecraft servers pre-1.17. It’ll run like crap, but if you must:

curl -o server1.5.jar https://launcher.mojang.com/v1/objects/f9ae3f651319151ce99a0bfad6b34fa16eb6775f/server.jar
java -jar server1.5.jar

You can find other server jars somewhere like MCVersions.

Web browser (Lynx)

Lynx is a non-graphical web browser that runs fast and can help with downloading files. sudo apk add lynx then lynx duckduckgo.com.

Web browser (NetSurf)

NetSurf is a HTML4 web browser that runs under X and renders apps graphically. sudo apk add netsurf then netsurf-gtk3. It’s good enough for the Dolphin Blog so that’s good enough for anybody.

Web browser (ArcticFox)

ArcticFox is a version of Firefox ~42 ESR that still runs on powerpc. sudo apk add arcticfox then arcticfox. It was pretty crashy at the time of writing but that might change with time.