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. Since it’s a newer distro though, some software simply isn’t available yet.

Downloads

You can choose between Adélie’s offical tarball or customised third-party images.

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

Basic Setup

If you’re using puffin9’s image, a lot of the setup work is already complete, you can skip to (section). At time of writing, a fresh install from tarball required using tty2 (Ctrl-Alt-F2) to get a login screen and complete installation, but this may be fixed down the road. For official Adélie media, the default account is root and the password is live.

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.
  3. Change root’s password (to something other than ‘live’) with passwd root.

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 adelie-live. 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 wiiu as your hostname:

127.0.0.1       localhost wiiu
::1             localhost wiiu

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 the required packages aren’t installed in the default Adélie tarball.)

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.

Note the prescence of state DOWN in the first line of each - they are not connected automatically. To bring them up, we can run dhcpcd -w eth0 (or dhcpcd -w usb0 in the Android case). This will run until it receives an IP, which can take a few seconds, and then return you to a shell. You can try to ping some website (e.g. 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 (Firefox..?)

At time of writing (2024-07-12), firefox-esr isn’t in the latest Adélie repos, even though it used to be. Still, try sudo apk add firefox-esr in case it’s come back! I also tried a half-dozen “alternative” builds of Firefox (ArcticFox, Faded Orb, Interweb, Sealion, SeaMonkey, SpiderWeb…) and all of them were missing glibc symbols.

Update 2024-10-06: The maintainer of another distro, ArchPOWER, told me that Adélie switched their Firefox build to ppc64 only. This leaves NetSurf as the best option in the ppc 32-bit repos.