August 26th, 2008 - I have the GameCube on my hands

echo hi

Today my friend Memo sold me a nice black GameCube in very good conditions, he is also giving me the Metroid Prime disc next tuesday. My objective is to add this console to the cluster after installing a modchip on it to boot gcLinux miniDVD's and I will also buy the GameCube Broadband Adapter (GC-BBA for short) to connect this node to the cluster's network.

As I have seen the GC-BBA is rare in ebay or in other sites, but I'm still geting one in good condition to plug it to the GC and add Network connectivity to it

I believe that's all for this post.

byte[] && EOT

August 13th 2008 - This blog is not dead !!!

printf("hi");

Whoa, It's been so long since I haven't posted anything on this blog.

As many of you know we just started classes again, during the vacations period I used the PS2 like a normal user (I had a lot of fun playing Resident Evil, Need for Speed and Metal Gear Solid on it) I booted up a couple times in linux and (finally) installed the BlackRhino distribution on it.

The kernel is still being quite (too) old here in BlackRhino, there is no X server leaving the system in console mode, it is no as bad as it sounds (if you got ued to console mode installing gentoo or if you've rescued your system when you accidentally removed the X server lol)

I did some research of running GNU/Linux on other game consoles:

• Sega DreamCast: Runs its LinuxDC distro
  
• Nintendo GameCube: stable release gcLinux
• Microsoft XBOX: stable releases Xebian, gentooX and some others...
• Nintendo Wii:
• Microsoft xbox360: testing releases debian-etch, ubuntu7.04 and 7.10
• Sony PlayStation 3: Well what can I say about this super computer... it runs Linux (YellowDog,Ubuntu,Debian,Gentoo,...)

I also learned some gimp while making a poster for the project's home page, give me some feedback if you like it or not

After seeing the videos hosted on the free60 project's page I was a little disapointed of knowing the PS2 is not a very good platform to run linux on. In fact I realized of this the time when I saw no updates to the system, leaving it in a 2.2 kernel based system WITH NO USB MASS STORAGE DRIVER, NOR AN ALTERNATE NETWORK DRIVER such as pegasus-II, the drivers may be ported, but as I read in some pages it's too difficult to make a new kernel for the ps2, starting with the cross-compiling part.

Given the fact the PS2 is the only game console which runs a pre 2.6 kernel I deceided to drop its integration into the cluster processing, I'm not dropping the entire support on it, it can be a web server or something else and still be integrated in other parts of the project.

Well, this large post is the synthetized part of what I did related to this project during summer vacations.

byte[] && EOT

May 22nd 2008 - PS2 showcase

echo hi

Today we had the PS2 Linux showcase on the networking lab
I was carring the chubby PlayStation 2 together with my 5 inch B/W TV which I used as a monitor because the console has a non standard VGA output called SyncOnGreen (SoG) which is not recognized by many of the monitors.

I introduced myself and I begun to set up the environment (put cables, connect devices together and power everything up), after powering up the devices I almost forgot to put a little fun into the presentation with two litthe penguins, one is a PenPen figure (from the Evangelion Series) and the other was some other penguin I found in a store some day xD.

I booted up the PS2 Linux System from the Memory Card and since there is no xinit script the system started into the expected state (console mode) I made my custom scripts to show the different window managers prestent in this distribution. Basically the scripts just write some string into a file (using echo and output redirection to a file, nothing special, basic stuff actually) and with the xsession file we may call startx and the selected window manager is loaded.

After this scripting and loading proceess I showed the (very old) gnome desktop environment, executed a little few programs (gnome-terminal, gimp, mozilla and gedit) Then I realized the system uses GTK1 (the system is old xD) I havent seen that square-shaped menus since the time I read some Fedora installation handbook back in highschool.

After the presentation of the programs I wrote a program in C, the most basic program (hello world) to test the gcc compiler, it worked as expected. after this my friend Luis asked me if the system had python console, since I don't code in that language (at least not yet) I wasn't aware if that module was present, then I told him to give it a try.

He tried it and yes there was a python console, he also wrote a program and runned it.

What follows from here?... Well the next thing to do apart from keep resarching is getting the other nodes for the system and plenty +/-R media in case +/-RW media doesn't work with the console drives.

I want to thank my networking lab teacher Tania Arteaga for giving me the chance to show the work I've done, I also want to thank Luis for the photos he took of the showcase and to everyone who attended the event.

(this is the top of the iceberg, it might not be an impressive ammount of work since it was basically a installation of the system, but there are more things to come).