Slashdot Mirror
GameCube-Powered Webserver
Daniel Kolph writes "The GameCube Linux Project has just released, what they call the GameCube Linux Alpha
This is an 1 MB busybox-based Linux system that contains screen output, network code, a telnet server and a webserver. They also provide a kernel patch. (Screenshots/Download)"
Let's just get the 'they must be running their website on it' joke out of the way right now.
Looks like their server is powered by a gamecube.
Mario can't handle the load of the pipe, we may need another plumber.
I can't think of any more lame jokes
I can run Linux on my GameCube and OS X on my XBox 2 now? Man today is a great /. day for hacking videogame consoles. PowerPC rocks.
.deviatefromtheabsolute.
Sony PS2/Linux vs. Gamecube Linux vs. Xbox Linux? I'm looking forward to seeing which is the better choice for my database cluster.
Who the hell's gonna use before they port it from Alpha to PowerPC?
So now both the games and the OS are better than Xbox
Is this the first-ever Shashdotted GameCube? First-ever Slashdotted game console period?
The Ezine Directory
Mirror!
"Dad, I'm tired of my old console. It's not cutting edge any more!"
"No problem, son. Give it to me, and I'll turn it into neat server"
So, after things like C64 servers, and various other Linux on console builds, what's the next challenge? A Sinclair ZX81 (Timex 1000) server?
"She's furniture with a pulse"
[Insert witty Beowulf cluster joke here]
Seriously though, why would someone do this? It's not going to be very powerful, there's no way in hades it would survive a
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
It even uses a backported version of Amigo Imnolar's O(1) scheduler patch. I reckon this'll probably run almost as fast as the raw GameCube hardware/firmware.
FloodMT: crapflood Movab
....when you telnet from a GameCube!
On a more serious note (the site is down), do you install from a mini-DVD, or from a memory card? Does it involve starting and stopping a certain game like the Xbox?
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
so Xbox Linux, then?
Here is a mirror of the screenshots in case the server gets /.ed.
http://hackermedia.net/downloads/gamecubelinux
Hacker Media
You know it's a sad state of affairs when someone has to put a disclaimer at the bottom of thier website about the DMCA. Its really a bummer that you can't just do anything to the things you own anymore. Just how useless does this make things? Oh wow another game system. Or COOL, my game system can do this and this and this! The only reason I bought a Dreamcast was for haXorability, and all the cool software people were writing for it. And it's the cool things like this that make me want to buy a game cube.
This is in no way like the WarpPipe project.
The Warppipe project is a PC application and creates a virtual LAN among Gamecubes over the Internet.
This is Linux on the Gamecube. As in running directly on the Gamecube. You won't be able to play any Gamecube games in this mode.
(Italian accent) It's a me Linux!
Because it's there.
~Berj
Why is there always telnet? Because of the clear text transmitted password?
Why can't they implement ssh from start up of their project?
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
with network built in, and a cheap OEM celeron. Mix in bootable USB key, RAM, power supply, shake. Serve cold.
In fact, none of the PS2, Gamecube, or XBox have NEARLY enough RAM to even fathom running a database, let alone much else (since you can't even cache very much from fixed media, for example).
Duh.
It might make a good kerberos or DNS server or something that needs to be "hardened" and always up, with a small in-memory image. But that's probably only going to fly in a college dorm at a Tech University.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
So far, they are just playing with software. They convince the GameCube to load the software over the network port.
:-(
I'm probably not very interested in this unless I can hack the hardware a bit: add a hard drive, add a second network port, etc.
A GameCube would make a sweet firewall/router box if you could get two network ports on it and Linux. The price would be right too.
Note that the optical drive is fairly useless: you cannot burn a disk that will work in a GameCube, not with a conventional CD burner.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Enhydra, an Open Source Java-based Application Server, was recently installed on an XBox using Xebian.
I had submitted a story about this the day it happened (a few days ago) but for some reason it didn't make the cut. I guess underpowered web servers are sexier than underpowered application servers..(?)
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Does anyone remember Magnavox's Odyssey 2? It had cool games, very atari 2600-like, with a one button joystick. But, it had a full keyboard, and some games used it. Heck it even had a crude speech adapter. Makes you wonder why they don't build a keyboard right into the current consoles. Might make playing first person games more PC-like. And yes, I know you can play most games on the PC too, but still...new uses such as displaying jpg cd's, etc.
He's got a bookmark to Slashdot in Safari! (look at the first screenshot). Real men type it in!
Ever consider he is too busy writing code no one else will help with...bookmarks help!
Cool and useless... signs of a Nice Hack(tm)!
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Manta
till they port 2.6, overclock the CPU, put on water cooling and cluster it :)
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
Sure its cool. Respect from The Open Source Community? Maybe. Will it ever be used for something useful? NO. Kudos from peers? Minimal.
These projects are cool, but they serve no real purpose except for the "Oh yeah, you'll never guess what I did to my cube..."
Again WHY?
Probably because most of our jobs are in India now...we have plenty of free time...
Oh well, I wish being slashdotted and herds of geeks saying "WOW" paid bills.
Solid!
I keep trying the 192.168.0.47 address that this screenshot shows for the GameCube server but I just get my crappy obsolete DreamCast webserver :o(
Beep beep.
Please don't mod this as flamebait or a troll, because this is honestly inteded as a serious question:
What's the point of running Linux on a Gamecube or PS-2? (I kinda get the point of running it on the X-Box, as it's a mini PC.) Is it doing anything that you couldn't do with old PC or Sun hardware for the same cost, or is this just another hacker-ish "because we can" thing to do?
Not the troll mod on the liberal bashing gpp, but that a sarcastic post complaining about liberal claims of the intellectual high ground went over your head.
My country right or wrong (unless those fucking Democrats are in power). Smaller, less intrusive government (unless we need secret police powers to protect freedom). Fascism and torture are bad (unless our allies are the perpetrators). Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion. Science must be restrained by Christian morality, but business must not be restrained by anything.
See, I do understand conservative political thought.
I've always been fascinated by a seeming mini-obsession with making things into other things.
My dream is a toliet that also makes coffee.
Think of the time saved in the morning.
Think of the health risks.
Reasons to use Telnet over SSH:
1) Lower CPU ulitilization
2) Lower Memory usage
3) Convenience
4) It's currently not being used as a Public web server.
once, I actual got Linux running on an 386!
ha-hah!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The funny thing is, IIRC, it actually survived the slashdotting and continued to serve it's, albeit static, pages just fine!
An eye for an eye... leaves the whole world blind.
let's talk hardware...isn't that a Commodore monitor? Possibly even the Amiga 1084 series?!
A real point would be for the educational experience. Seriously - the developer(s) have to do reverse engineering, firmware hacking, hardware hacking, and of course programming. Or maybe because they enjoy it.
Wait? Where the hell is NetBSD on this?
I wanna see NetBSD too...competition is good.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Or maybe he has the "login with this link" bookmarked. Y'now, the one that logs you in and is totally insecure? When I try adding a link to Slashdot.org in Firebird, it wants to name it "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters". So he obviously edited the bookmark to some extent.
well part way. It is running 2.6.1 goto http://www.gc-linux.org/down/dmesg.txt
first few lines say
Total memory = 23MB; using 64kB for hash table (at c01c0000) Linux version 2.6.1 (mist@l) (gcc version 3.3) #5 Tue Feb 3 00:30:18 CET 2004
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
The server is really slow and not showing the images Here's the google cache: http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:EnUXoYbNHugJ: www.gc-linux.org/docs/screenshots.html+&hl=en&ie=U TF-8
**If the images don't show right click on the whitespace and click show images
"Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...."
Two words: blue sparks.
Let's hope they don't adopt the Street Fighter numbering system for new versions. I can see it now:
Me: But I already have GameCube Linux Alpha 2 Turbo
Salesman: Yes, but you don't have GameCube Linux Alpha 2 Turbo Championship Edition.
Me: WHERE DO I SIGN?!
...and boy are my thumbs tired!
Really, what does this prove or disprove? Nothing. I'm sure these guys are having fun but what is next, Linux running on a Timex watch?
ssh is better for stable environment, telnet is better for the research lab.
Less is more !
Ahhh.. crap I can't do it... :)
May the source be with you!
Of course they'd get slashdotted - the screenshots add up to bigger than the ~1MB downloadable image...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
For KDE to be ported so I can call my box the GameKube!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
I think this is wonderful because here is a little self-contained fast, very-capable graphic machine. If the software is available, a physician for instance could run by Wal-Mart and pull down some kind of surgery simulator to practice on before an operation.
OK, a one-armed firewall isn't going to protect you against everything, but there are configurations where it works just fine. For instance, if it's bright enough to handle two different IP addresses on the same port, you can have it look like 1.1.1.1 to your cable modem and 10.1.1.1 to your PC, and do NAT or proxies or whatever. But even if it can only support one address, you can still use it for proxies - its address is 10.2.2.2, and your PC is 10.3.3.3 and only accepts packets from 10.2.2.2 (either by using internal firewalls, or setting the routing protocols appropriately, or whatever), plus you can set your web browser, email, and maybe POP/IMAP to use the one-armed bandit as a proxy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Because the games suck and they are stuck with all these unused gamecubes. I am reminded of the dude on the Simpsons who steals a VCR and realizes down the road that it's beta.
Is that for real? The server seemed pretty quick. One html file would take up more ram than the C-64 has free.
One of the neatest things about GC is that it's got enough smarts burned into it to run without any discs or cards inserted. perhaps nintendo can be talked into releasing a Linux "bootable" disc...
There definatly seems to be a collective tightening of assholes when it comes to jokes that concern technology...
Step 1: Make joke about console running server sofware
Step 2: Get modded down to 7th level of hell
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Lose faith in slashdot
5468652047616D65
Since the GameCube spins discs in the opposite direction or so i heard (and outside the rim towards the center to read them) as a copy protection mechanism, i really wonder how they did it.
Should we call the OS Xunil?
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
The thing about having Linux on a Gamecube as opposed as installing it on an Xbox is the great power consumption savings.
The Xbox is 4-5 times more power-hungry than a Gamecube, but you'd never get anywhere near 4x performance. For a personal server (even media player) the Gamecube's CPU, GPU and memory performance are great, good enough for most tasks and it has component video and digital audio output capabilities (though Nintendo has never released the digital audio adapter, so the only way to do it is using the Panasonic Q and the component cables are not very easy to get).
The machine is also very cheap at $100 and small enough to fit anywhere, at least better than the Xbox. It may not have a Hard Drive but there's an SD Card adaptor that could be used for mass storage. I really prefer to have a smaller, low power alternative. You just can't get a 40W machine with such strong capabilities for that price anywhere else.
The only thing missing is a way to automatically boot into Linux, as you still need the PSOLoad trick. It would be wonderful if some company like Codejunkies released a boot disk like the Freeloader. I'd hate to be forced into manually loading PSO every time there's a power outage.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Ingo Molnar.
:-)
("My name is Amigo Imnolar. You hacked my kernel. Prepare to die."
one, two, one two like a duck
------------ begin quote -----------
...
:P
I'm probably not very interested in this unless I can hack the hardware a bit: add a hard drive, add a second network port, etc.
A GameCube would make a sweet firewall/router box if you could get two network ports on it and Linux. The price would be right too.
Note that the optical drive is fairly useless
------------- end quote ------------
Here's a little factoid that will make it even less interesting: The broad band adapter (BBA) on the 'cube is only accessable through an 8bit bus that runs... um, shall we say... rather slowly. So slow, in fact, that the adapter is configured (by software) to *NOT communicate at 100base-T* since there's not enough bandwidth to the CPU on that particular bus to support data rates that high. So the OS Libraries put the BBA into 10base-T mode as soon as they come online after bootup.
Apparently, if one watches the lights on the hub / switch that the BBA is connected to, it'll start out at 100base-T when the power is thrown, then downgrade to 10base-T once the game comes up. Disclaimer: I don't have a BBA on my cube, so I've never seen it happen.
Which is fine by me, since I don't play online console games anyways. I'd rather have 3 friends over that stare at the TV by myself. Once again, we see that Nintendo designs hardware to suit their needs (which mesh nicely with mine as a gamer); not to suit others. Enjoy having your DNS server be the slowest box on the LAN.
Donald Duck will have a SCREAMING ORGASM when some guy figures out how to host a web page on his TI-83 calculator.
...but does it run Linux? oh, wait... nevermind...
Use netcat to connect to an arbitrary port to see what talks back to you. Use ssh to get a shell on a remote machine. Use telnet to connect to/from machines that are too old to have something modern.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Installs gamecube server... Day One: checking out my new website powered by my gamecube server. Day Two: I didn't put this picture of Mario in here.....
Yes, I do listen to them, Boortz, Hannity, and O'Reilly to name a few. Do they manipulate stories, heck no. I guess what differs from me is that when I hear something that interests me, I immediately try to find other reports to verify it. 9 times out of 10, the above talk radio hosts are right.
Take this for example, I don't know WHO to believe. In Saturday's paper there was a report from the AP about the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudia Arabia. The cleric that was giving the ending speech said roughly "God, make the holy Muslim warriors across the Earth victorious in their struggle against the Zionist west." Saturday night, ABC evening news reports a totally different story saying the cleric's speech was about his call for Muslims around the world to be peaceful and stop killing people.
WTF??!! Two liberal media outlets, TWO completely different stories.
And check this out, in Sunday's paper, there was another AP story and get this, it matched what ABC News reported. Same pilgrimage, same cleric.
So now who do you believe?
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
(nt stands for "no text")
not so much the parent. You could take it either way.
:-)
Although I still wanna see the Tom's Hardware shootout.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I am running webserver (thttpd) and ssh (dropbear) on my iPaq PDA (handhelds.org-brew familiar linux 0.7.3+opie 1.0.3). Is it worth to make a barnum style slashdot article out of it?
There you are, staring at me again.
I looked up and saw that noone had mentioned this, and its worth mentioning:
The #1 reason I can see for GC-Linux is EMULATION.
Imagine being able to sit on your couch and play all your game roms with your WAVEBIRD ahhhhh that would be nice wouldn't it? XBOX users have this luxury (without the wavebird) and soon GC owners will too!
Already there is emulation on the GC with pirated roms from what I've read-- they managed to reverse engineer the N64 emulator that was used on the zelda demo disk and the NES emulator used for Metroid on the Metroid Prime disk. Insane!
Besides emulation theres mp3 playing through the network, web views (where a self-refreshing webpage is pre-made with say.. local news and weather, and you point your GC at it and leave it on your TV or pick it from a menu a la HTPC), mabye divx playback through the network as well? Who knows!
But once you've dropped an OS that everyone can code applications for onto the GC the possibilites are endless. I'd like to see some kind of insane multiplayer addon where games that don't take advantage of the broadband adapter are somehow made compatible with it.
Eh? See its not "just for fun" or "because we can".. its really "because we can't let XBOXers have all the fun.. and those PS2 blokes as well"
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
best taken away from the brain damaged.
How can it be a troll to claim to be running Linux on a worm? Who is going to 'fall for' my claim? Does anyone (beside the moderator) actually think I may have gotten a computer operating system to run on an organism just slightly more complex than an ameoba?
I apologize if you got embarrased when you ran to all your freinds telling them the amazing news that someone got Linux running on an animal with a brain the size of a comma. But that's your fault and it doesn't make this silly humorous post a 'troll'.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat