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KDE Running On A GameCube
Bruno_me writes "Some of the folks at the GameCube Linux project have gotten KDE to run on a GameCube. There's a screenshot of what it actually looks like and what it should look like. This is the first real 'GameKube.' And of course, here is the original frame buffer (dd if=/dev/fb0 of=./kde.fbdump)."
Unlike the Xbox or the PS2, there are no mod-chips for the gamecube. Nintendo did one hell of a job constructing this little machine.
:^).
The way to hack the Gamecube is somewhat interesting. Back in the days of the Sega Dreamcast, there was a game known as "Phantasy Star Online", which attempted to connect to a remote server to get and execute whatever code it got from the remote server.... grin
When Sega ported the game to the GameCube, the exploit came with it. So what folks do is they load up Phantasy Star Online 1+11, run a "loader" on their computer (linux or windows). And have the loader on their computer send the gamecube whatever they want (home games, illegal rips, the linux kernel, etc).
This has been over-simplified greatly.
And note: some of you might be thinking about using this to play illegal copies of games. Don't bother. You end up needing to use a bazillion different loaders to load whatever game, and the network port of the Gamecube is limited to 10mbps, which makes many games unplayable.
Sunny Dubey
Maybe with somthing like this?
It's a dump of the framebuffer console. To view it, you've got to run Linux with vesafb, for example. Just "cat kde.fbdump > /dev/fb0". You need to use the right bit depth and resolution for it to work though, and it's not specified.
From all reports yes it booted but the color map was broken on the x server so it didn't look really great. Here is what it looks like. I think it took slightly less long than expected, only four and a half days.
:). That image is of the Centris display, but it's my Athlon's PearPC session merely using X11 on the Centris.
:).
nooooo. no no no.
The boot failed due to a byte-order issue with drive images made on PCs, and failed at the four and a half day mark. I'm not sure where you got the URL for the image, I can only presume once it was pasted on IRC it spreads everywhere
I'll have it booting sometime soon, just not this week
To enter text commands, just do an "ssh -l root 192.168.0.47" from the console on your PC. The default root password is "cube". Once you've done that, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. Use apt-get to install links and BitchX, and you can brag to your friends that you're running a browser and IRC client on your Gamecube and typing through your PC.
It's not really useful for anything but Geek points at the moment, but GC-Linux development is coming along very quickly. There's already a hardware-accelerated video driver, and ALSA is working, as well as SDL and many more things. I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future, some kind of Mplayer-based streaming media client was written for GC-Linux, and it found a practical purpose as a way of playing MP3/Vorbis/Videos from NFS shares on a LAN. All the framework is there, it would just take someone to put it together.
Mplayer works fine, and you can see some more useless screenshots here. Snes9x has also been ported, as well as a couple other emulators (MAME and some neogeo emulator for example). Other than that I haven't found much use for it except for the geek-factor, the memory is too limited to do anything heavy... But playing SNES games on the cube is pretty sweet though.
Give me a job. Please?
(a) no modding involved, so in that respect it's really easy to get up and running. (b) Well, since they have mplayer running, you could use it as a network media player. I think if someone developed a front end specifically for gclinux that would let you specify a samba/windows file share in a .conf file somewhere, displayed the files in some user-friendly way, and then spawned mplayer when you clicked on one,... well that'd be nice. ... sadly, I don't know how to program squat on linux or I'd be all over that.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.