Dunno if anybody ever considered it, but - even if its hardware specs are nothing special - could be interesting and not that difficoult…
https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Wii-Linux
Nice - recent - video:
Last but not least, we can also provide one for free to the dev who will work on this.
While it might be interesting, it’s not a speed demon and it’s probably not going to be used by many people. The specs are nothing to write home about and you’re going to be stuck with a low resolution composite output.
An old iMac G4, Powerbook G4 or Mac Mini G4 is probably a better target for a PowerPC port… but wouldn’t it be better to focus on hardware that’s currently available? There’s some developments with modern PPC hardware.
Well, you need to divide the RAM needed by Haiku by about 3 to 4 times. And of course you need a PowerPC port of Haiku, we have one but it needs an OpenFirmware bootloader.
It can be a fun and interesting project to get haiku_loader running and showing the boot menu, but probably it will be difficult to boot the whole OS.
I have a Mac Mini G4 and so I’d love to see it happen, but I’m not an OS dev guy. I’m sticking to compilers… lol.
Having said that - if someone was to start the port, I would get involved. I’m just not able to start it myself.
Edit: I also probably could lay my hands on a Wii as there was one that technically I was going to get back from my kids. I also have a LOT of old world Macs, including G3’s.
I was planning to try and port Haiku to the Wii U. It’s specs are a bit more forgiving.
Nothing concrete yet, I don’t even have the hardware yet. You can talk on xmpp if this sounds interesting to you though!
xmpp:nintendo@muc.linkmauve.fr?join
That sounds awesome, I have no programming knowledge or really anything I can help with but I loved the Wii U and it’s sad to see how unpopular it is in the alternative OS world.
Does it have DRM copy and boot protection? If it have, I see no meaning on spending time on this. Hacking it may be illegal in some countries.
It’s not illegal in my jurisdiction, why would I care what other countries think?
Getting Haiku to work on the Wii or Wii U sounds like a great endeavour!
There is already some PowerPC code in the kernel here: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/tree/master/src/system/kernel/arch/ppc and build instructions for PowerPC here: Compiling Haiku for PowerPC | Haiku Project. It looks like the Wii’s PowerPC processor isn’t too far from the old Macintosh machines, and it seems the community has documented the boot loader for Linux: boot2 - WiiBrew. Seems possible.
I’d like to see Haiku running on POWER9 (ppc64[le]) systems by Raptor Computing someday. https://www.raptorcs.com/
It would be great to have PowerPC support for Haiku.
I’m following the progress of the PowerPC Notebook project (GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC notebook - An Open Hardware project for everyone, a PowerPC Notebook for you. Join now!) with much interest and when it’s finally available (and if it’s not too expensive),I’ll get one and want to use it with Haiku.
…maybe Haiku could scout for skilled devs of useful infos from these (old) PPC-linux projects ?