30 ms·

DSLinux – Linux for the Nintendo DS

301 points by AntiRush 3y ago

true_blue 3y ago
The Wikipedia article listed on the website was deleted as "non-notable". Here's an archive of it though: https://web.archive.org/web/20170708075915/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSLinux#cite_note-2 https://web.archive.org/web/20170708075915/https://en.wikipe...
- crooked-v 3y ago
  I don't believe in Hell, but if I did I would suspect it would have a special place for Wikipedia deletionists, somewhere near the people who never return their shopping carts.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Given the price of bits these days a single bit flag with 'non notable' would suffice and then they could keep these and allow people to see 'full' or 'just notable'. That should satisfy all parties. Of course there is then also the cost of the bits of the articles themselves but that too would be manageable.
    - sithadmin 3y ago
      The problem with this idea is that it will just be abused for SEO spam junk, and you'll have to default to hiding all content with the 'non notable' bit from discovery by default lest the entire ecosystem get dragged down by the pollution. At this point, you might as well delete the content entirely, because it's just taking up space and not contributing to the experience for the vast majority of users.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        I think there is a pretty easy to distinguish difference between 'SEO spam junk' and 'non notable' but if you're worried about that you could always have 'non notable' default to all outbound links to be 'nofollow'. For every problem there is a solution, if you want to solve it. I've seen and heard just about every excuse possible why particular things should be 'non notable' but not a single one that has stood up to scrutiny, it always seems to in the end boil down to 'because we say so'. Which is a pity because ultimately 'notability' is as much in the eye of the beholder as it is something objective and what is non-notable to one large group may well be notable to another. And if that first group is over-represented amongst the wikipedians then that's the end of that, no matter how important something really is.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I think Wikipedia deletionists would love to open up a circle of hell just for video games and related topics because it seems quite hard for a book to be considered notable on Wikipedia but hard for a game not to be. For instance only half of this author's books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Lepore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Lepore are considered notable enough to have Wikipedia pages (and notably not the excellent https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Invented/dp/1631496107 https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Inven... but maybe that is just my opinion as a computer nerd who works in the public opinion field... If you notice I try not to say things like "most people think that" because I don't want to be caught with my facts wrong.) but truly obscure games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Princess seem to not have to fight for notability at all. (Personally I kinda like that one, but I'm a serious weeb and even I'll admit that it is terribly balanced and too grindy)
    - LeoPanthera 3y ago
      You should join the group with the very long name. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Wikipedians_Who_Dislike_Making_Broad_Judgments_About_the_Worthiness_of_a_General_Category_of_Article,_and_Who_Are_in_Favor_of_the_Deletion_of_Some_Particularly_Bad_Articles,_but_That_Doesn%27t_Mean_They_Are_Deletionists https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Wikipedians_W...
    - MenhirMike 3y ago
      It's a problem that came up ~~a few years~~more than a decade ago with Kate Middleton's Wedding Dress which was deemed "not significant" initially, whereas every niche Linux distro has a page, which simply shows the demographics of the folks in charge of moderating Wikipedia: https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-wedding-gown-and-wikipedia-s-gender-gap.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-weddin... I get the idea of "Let's keep Wikipedia for relevant things instead of a graveyard of everyone that wants to self-promote their meaningless project", but there is absolutely a real problem here. Code of Princess is relevant because it's published by Atlus, but by that measure, any of Jill Lepore should be relevant enough. That said: Do you know if the books without pages were removed for non-relevance, or if it's simply a matter of "No one has created a proper Wikipedia Article for it yet?"
- lynguist 3y ago
  Interestingly this one is still up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux Which is the equivalent project (also on μCLinux) on an iPod.
  - eggsome 3y ago
    I interviewed the creator of μCLinux recently here: https://riscvnews.com/posts/j-core-interview/ https://riscvnews.com/posts/j-core-interview/
  - carstenhag 3y ago
    I remember ...taking my sister's iPod something to install this and then to connect it to my PS3 in order to jailbreak it. My sister was not happy of course, I am not sure whether I was able to reset the iPod to its original state or not.
smoldesu 3y ago
It's not exactly the modern equivalent, but owners of a modded Nintendo Switch can dual-boot with a few different Linux images: https://wiki.switchroot.org/ https://wiki.switchroot.org/ Since it's based on the official (albeit outdated) Tegra drivers, you can run a surprising amount of stuff on it. I got SkiFree working in Box86 and called it a day.
- monocasa 3y ago
  Additionally, the switch is a hop, skip, and a jump away from being the same hardware as a Tegra Shield that the L4T images initially targeted. Like even down to the same exact model of DRAM chips which should have been more of a commodity and a reflection of the manufacturer's vendor relationships. It's as close to an officially supported Linux distro for Nintendo hardware as we've ever gotten.
  - an-unknown 3y ago
    > It's as close to an officially supported Linux distro for Nintendo hardware as we've ever gotten. To be fair, Linux on the Wii was also quite good: I remember running Debian 5 Lenny on my Wii many years ago, and it seemed to be "just" a different kernel with drivers for the Wii hardware but with the normal userspace / repos. With an USB mouse and keyboard this was even somewhat usable, even with X11 and some lightweight window manager. Of course RAM was quite limited with only 80MB in total, but still. It definitely wasn't as hacky or limited as DSLinux.
    - monocasa 3y ago
      It wasn't supported by those who designed most of the circuit board though.
mikhael28 3y ago
I recently did a deep dive into DS homebrew. Some cool stuff - a Yugioh calculator, mp3 player, port of Doom. In particular, I just love the hardware of the DS Lite or the DsI - it feels great in 2023, and the symmetrical screens are amazing when holding in vertical mode reading an ebook or playing Hotel Dusk. It also has one of the best pieces of software ever for learning Chinese, ‘My Chinese Coach’ - there are additionally two more (at least) homebrew software packages that focus on Chinese, such as DS Zhongwhen. DS is very underrated - so many great games, and it’s an emulation dream. All without being too powerful, and having ‘realistic’ graphics that just drain battery life.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  The most surprising thing to me about DS and Switch homebrew was how approachable they are. For some reason I always imagined building things on them would be wizardry, but it's really not.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    I had a dive in to it. The docs and info is pretty accessible, the problem comes from the fact that the hardware itself is inherently pretty confusing. Having to understand all these memory banks and graphics modes, etc. Was a lot of fun though. It's super cool how easy it is to just download libnds, compile the demos and get them running with a $9 flash cart.
- mikhael28 3y ago
  For the record, there are dozens of pieces of homebrew software worth mentioning.
  - jimmaswell 3y ago
    Lemminds DS is my favorite. http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/ http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/
- Hydraulix989 3y ago
  I was the one who ported DOOM to DS back in high school; we were all in the same DS homebrew IRC channel together. A lot of my now-closest friends worked on the other projects (including the author of DS Linux) -- incidentally we all ended up working for various tech companies in Silicon Valley and ended up reuniting in real life decades later.
ndesaulniers 3y ago
I did a stream about this on twitch. Someone uploaded it to YouTube. Trying to find it Aha: https://youtu.be/mTo8yb6q4Lw?si=LAchs9gVSHRONxn2 https://youtu.be/mTo8yb6q4Lw?si=LAchs9gVSHRONxn2
monocasa 3y ago
Interestingly, based on some of the same uCLinux work as another story on the HN home page right now: 789 KB Linux Without MMU on RISC-V https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37822082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37822082
erik 3y ago
I made a few small contributions to this a long time ago. Nice to see that the website is still up! Probably the most interesting feature of this project was how it handled memory. The DS only has 4mb of ram. And there is no MMU, so swap isn't an option. But the gameboy cartridge port has 32mb of address space mapped to the bus. And there are homebrew/piracy cartridges that fill that space with 32mb of ram. Which is great, except that the DS can only write to the cartridge port on 16-bit aligned addresses. And almost all software will assume that 8-bit aligned writes will work. To make use of the expansion memory the developers ended up creating a patched GCC that would convert any writes to unaligned locations to an appropriate read, 16-bit write, and set of shift operations.
- erik 3y ago
  Another quirk: It was pretty common to load your homebrew software from a cartridge in the gameboy port. The cartridges would have some combination of ram and flash based storage or CF Card, and you could tell the cartridge to expose the storage or the ram as they were behind some sort of banking scheme. This meant that the storage system was mapped directly to the bus. So to save on ram, programs were run "in place", executing directly from the storage rather than being copied to ram first.
- MenhirMike 3y ago
  > And there are homebrew/piracy cartridges that fill that space with 32mb of ram. There's even an official one, the Opera Web Browser came with a second cartridge for the "GBA" slot to add 8 MB of RAM and a MMU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_Browser#Memory_Expansion_Pak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_Browser#Memory_Exp... (I've long lost the Opera DS cartridge, but the memory expansion is still in my DS Lite as a slot cover)
  - Operyl 3y ago
    Haha! I always wondered as a kid why that was a requirement. The number of times I had to use the Opera browser to get around my restrictive mother, sigh.
  - monocasa 3y ago
askiiart 3y ago
I remember looking into this a couple months back because I wanted to SSH into my server from my DSi, just for the lolz. I wasn't too invested in it, so when the wifi didn't "just work" I gave up, but I'd still love to get SSH working on that some day.
- erik 3y ago
  I believe most wifi routers have 802.11b support turned off by default these days. Otherwise, ssh should be doable!
- snvzz 3y ago
  >DSi Did DSLinux team ever manage to get it to work on the DSi? I still have my DSi and it still works, but I remember DSLinux didn't work with it.
  - chungy 3y ago
    It should work fine in the DS backwards compatibility mode, but a native DSi port might be slightly nicer. The DSi has 16MB of system RAM. Following that, the Old 3DS had 128MB and New 3DS had 256MB of RAM.
  - joshumax 3y ago
    Yes, it works, but there are some issues. The first one being that the SoC configuration runs in DS-compatibility mode which does not expose all of the available RAM in the DSi, and nds-bootstrap won't properly redirect I/O requests to the external SD card, which means you either need to embed the rootfs in the NDS ROM which won't persist changes, or use a flash cart and run the DLDI build instead.
    - snowram 3y ago
      Actually, someone made a working DSi mode WiFi driver some months ago. It is even used in a DSi compatible fork of ftpd. Very handy when transferring files on the SD card of a hacked DSi since it has WPA2 support unlike DS mode which is stuck with WEP. https://github.com/devkitPro/dswifi/issues/4#issuecomment-898803632 https://github.com/devkitPro/dswifi/issues/4#issuecomment-89... https://github.com/shinyquagsire23/dsiwifi https://github.com/shinyquagsire23/dsiwifi https://github.com/mtheall/ftpd/compare/master...shinyquagsire23:ftpd:master https://github.com/mtheall/ftpd/compare/master...shinyquagsi...
thosakwe 3y ago
I remember being 11 or so and installing this homebrew onto my DS... I had NO IDEA what Linux was at the time, but DSLinux helped me deepen my interest in computer science. So, thanks to the creators, and everyone who contributed code.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
5- 3y ago
also of note is a port of the inferno operating system to the ds, which makes for a rather nice platform. https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/Inferno_DS https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/Inferno_DS
- circuit10 3y ago
  For some reason Vodaphone wants me to confirm I’m over 18 to view this site
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    What has vodaphone to do with that website? Do they provide you a lying DNS and send you to their proxy servers? I suggest using DoH and uncensored DNS servers. Oh and cancel that shitty provider.
    - circuit10 3y ago
      It’s meant to block “adult content” but it seems to count things to do with hacking as adult content with no obvious way to report a false positive See https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/02/considered-18/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/02/considered-18/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31248250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31248250)
RecycledEle 3y ago
I love the idea of Linux on a Nintendo DS, but the name will cause confusion with this: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- luismedel 3y ago
  In fact, I read it as if SDLinux (the original and only one) was ported to Nintendo DS :-)
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    By SD linux, do you mean the version embedded on those wifi-enabled SD cards that used to exist?
    - luismedel 3y ago
      touchè!
namuol 3y ago
Back in high school, I used to go “war driving” on my bike around my neighborhood with DS Linux running on an M3 cart. Almost forgot this existed; thanks for sharing, this was a fun memory to dig up. I still have my DS and my M3 cart but the SD card with my old build on it is long gone.
heywoodlh 3y ago
As a heavy Linux user myself, I was wondering what kind of functionality you would gain from running Linux on a DS (aside from the obvious learning experience and “because you can”). I found the FAQ[0] answers this nicely. Basically, it boils down to anything you can do on the command line within the resource constraints of the DS. Would love to hear any DSLinux users who would be willing to share stories about cool functionality they were able to achieve. [0] https://www.dslinux.org/wiki/DSLinuxFAQ.html https://www.dslinux.org/wiki/DSLinuxFAQ.html
tylergetsay 3y ago
Every once and a while I get the urge to run this again and host a webpage from it.. sucks this device lacked a lot of IO and the wifi stack is so weird
widforss 3y ago
I could never run DSLinux, I was in eighth grade and couldn't afford the RAM pack (just used a pirate card for games). But I printed out all of the documentation at the school library and read it until I pretty much new it by heart, and that became my introduction to Linux. I can't remember if this was before or after I managed to inadvertently install (!?) Knoppix on my sister's school laptop, but my passion for Linux was there well before I had the means to run it myself.
priteau 3y ago
What a nice surprise to see this on the HN front page! I was involved with DSLinux for several years. I maintained nightly-ish builds that I hosted on my website. I don't think I ever contributed any code, as my C and system programming skills were still rudimentary at the time, but I did a fair amount of testing and helping people in the community. I sold my Nintendo DS since then, but I still have somewhere the Supercard that I would use to store and boot Linux, which looks like this: https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/File:SuperCard_CF_V2.jpg https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/File:SuperCard_CF_V2.jpg Most of credit for the amazing work that made this possible goes to a few individuals, in particular Malcolm Parsons (pepsiman), Stefan Sperling (who later became an OpenBSD developer), and Amadeus: http://dslinux.org/wiki/ContactingDevelopers.html http://dslinux.org/wiki/ContactingDevelopers.html
haunter 3y ago
Tried it on my New 3DS XL. There is a single .NDS build so starts perfectly with TwilightMenu++ http://dslinux.org/builds/dslinux.nds http://dslinux.org/builds/dslinux.nds The problem is the touch keyboard is unusuable. Most likely because of the NDS v 3DS screen resolution difference, it's impossible to type on it. Took me a couple of minutes to type "root" but never managed to hit Enter :D
mintplant 3y ago
This was my gateway into Linux! I'm grateful to whoever decided to bundle the BSDgames [0] and Frotz [1] packages, for sparking a lifelong love of text adventure games and interactive fiction. Imagine my surprise as a little kid poking around the bin directory, typing "advent" into the prompt expecting a simple advent calendar application, and instead getting dropped into a whole other world [2]... [0] https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD_games https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD_games [1] https://davidgriffith.gitlab.io/frotz/ https://davidgriffith.gitlab.io/frotz/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
- anthk 3y ago
  Same as you, but first I played IF games under Winfrotz/ZX Spectrum. Later, I ran Linux with advent/battlestar and such under Frotz for Unix (among trek) and I was hooked.
  - mintplant 3y ago
    How could I forget `battlestar`! The juxtaposition of the luxurious staterooms and all those corpses strewn around sure made an impression on kid me.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  You played text adventures by typing on a DS touch screen keyboard with a stylus?!
  - mintplant 3y ago
    I sure did! We got pretty good at text-entry with the stylus when it was the only input method we had to work with. Like how people adapted to thumb-typing on smartphone touch screens.
CiaranMcNulty 3y ago
I've a few DSi in a drawer somewhere... My first question was whether I can turn them into a k8s cluster

301 points by AntiRush 3y ago

The Wikipedia article listed on the website was deleted as "non-notable". Here's an archive of it though: https://web.archive.org/web/20170708075915/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSLinux#cite_note-2 https://web.archive.org/web/20170708075915/https://en.wikipe...

crooked-v 3y ago
I don't believe in Hell, but if I did I would suspect it would have a special place for Wikipedia deletionists, somewhere near the people who never return their shopping carts.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Given the price of bits these days a single bit flag with 'non notable' would suffice and then they could keep these and allow people to see 'full' or 'just notable'. That should satisfy all parties. Of course there is then also the cost of the bits of the articles themselves but that too would be manageable.
  - sithadmin 3y ago
    The problem with this idea is that it will just be abused for SEO spam junk, and you'll have to default to hiding all content with the 'non notable' bit from discovery by default lest the entire ecosystem get dragged down by the pollution. At this point, you might as well delete the content entirely, because it's just taking up space and not contributing to the experience for the vast majority of users.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      I think there is a pretty easy to distinguish difference between 'SEO spam junk' and 'non notable' but if you're worried about that you could always have 'non notable' default to all outbound links to be 'nofollow'. For every problem there is a solution, if you want to solve it. I've seen and heard just about every excuse possible why particular things should be 'non notable' but not a single one that has stood up to scrutiny, it always seems to in the end boil down to 'because we say so'. Which is a pity because ultimately 'notability' is as much in the eye of the beholder as it is something objective and what is non-notable to one large group may well be notable to another. And if that first group is over-represented amongst the wikipedians then that's the end of that, no matter how important something really is.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I think Wikipedia deletionists would love to open up a circle of hell just for video games and related topics because it seems quite hard for a book to be considered notable on Wikipedia but hard for a game not to be. For instance only half of this author's books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Lepore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Lepore are considered notable enough to have Wikipedia pages (and notably not the excellent https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Invented/dp/1631496107 https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Inven... but maybe that is just my opinion as a computer nerd who works in the public opinion field... If you notice I try not to say things like "most people think that" because I don't want to be caught with my facts wrong.) but truly obscure games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Princess seem to not have to fight for notability at all. (Personally I kinda like that one, but I'm a serious weeb and even I'll admit that it is terribly balanced and too grindy)
  - LeoPanthera 3y ago
    You should join the group with the very long name. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Wikipedians_Who_Dislike_Making_Broad_Judgments_About_the_Worthiness_of_a_General_Category_of_Article,_and_Who_Are_in_Favor_of_the_Deletion_of_Some_Particularly_Bad_Articles,_but_That_Doesn%27t_Mean_They_Are_Deletionists https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Wikipedians_W...
  - MenhirMike 3y ago
    It's a problem that came up ~~a few years~~more than a decade ago with Kate Middleton's Wedding Dress which was deemed "not significant" initially, whereas every niche Linux distro has a page, which simply shows the demographics of the folks in charge of moderating Wikipedia: https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-wedding-gown-and-wikipedia-s-gender-gap.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-weddin... I get the idea of "Let's keep Wikipedia for relevant things instead of a graveyard of everyone that wants to self-promote their meaningless project", but there is absolutely a real problem here. Code of Princess is relevant because it's published by Atlus, but by that measure, any of Jill Lepore should be relevant enough. That said: Do you know if the books without pages were removed for non-relevance, or if it's simply a matter of "No one has created a proper Wikipedia Article for it yet?"
lynguist 3y ago
Interestingly this one is still up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux Which is the equivalent project (also on μCLinux) on an iPod.
- eggsome 3y ago
  I interviewed the creator of μCLinux recently here: https://riscvnews.com/posts/j-core-interview/ https://riscvnews.com/posts/j-core-interview/
- carstenhag 3y ago
  I remember ...taking my sister's iPod something to install this and then to connect it to my PS3 in order to jailbreak it. My sister was not happy of course, I am not sure whether I was able to reset the iPod to its original state or not.

smoldesu 3y ago

It's not exactly the modern equivalent, but owners of a modded Nintendo Switch can dual-boot with a few different Linux images: https://wiki.switchroot.org/ https://wiki.switchroot.org/ Since it's based on the official (albeit outdated) Tegra drivers, you can run a surprising amount of stuff on it. I got SkiFree working in Box86 and called it a day.

monocasa 3y ago
Additionally, the switch is a hop, skip, and a jump away from being the same hardware as a Tegra Shield that the L4T images initially targeted. Like even down to the same exact model of DRAM chips which should have been more of a commodity and a reflection of the manufacturer's vendor relationships. It's as close to an officially supported Linux distro for Nintendo hardware as we've ever gotten.
- an-unknown 3y ago
  > It's as close to an officially supported Linux distro for Nintendo hardware as we've ever gotten. To be fair, Linux on the Wii was also quite good: I remember running Debian 5 Lenny on my Wii many years ago, and it seemed to be "just" a different kernel with drivers for the Wii hardware but with the normal userspace / repos. With an USB mouse and keyboard this was even somewhat usable, even with X11 and some lightweight window manager. Of course RAM was quite limited with only 80MB in total, but still. It definitely wasn't as hacky or limited as DSLinux.
  - monocasa 3y ago
    It wasn't supported by those who designed most of the circuit board though.

mikhael28 3y ago

I recently did a deep dive into DS homebrew. Some cool stuff - a Yugioh calculator, mp3 player, port of Doom. In particular, I just love the hardware of the DS Lite or the DsI - it feels great in 2023, and the symmetrical screens are amazing when holding in vertical mode reading an ebook or playing Hotel Dusk. It also has one of the best pieces of software ever for learning Chinese, ‘My Chinese Coach’ - there are additionally two more (at least) homebrew software packages that focus on Chinese, such as DS Zhongwhen. DS is very underrated - so many great games, and it’s an emulation dream. All without being too powerful, and having ‘realistic’ graphics that just drain battery life.

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
The most surprising thing to me about DS and Switch homebrew was how approachable they are. For some reason I always imagined building things on them would be wizardry, but it's really not.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  I had a dive in to it. The docs and info is pretty accessible, the problem comes from the fact that the hardware itself is inherently pretty confusing. Having to understand all these memory banks and graphics modes, etc. Was a lot of fun though. It's super cool how easy it is to just download libnds, compile the demos and get them running with a $9 flash cart.
mikhael28 3y ago
For the record, there are dozens of pieces of homebrew software worth mentioning.
- jimmaswell 3y ago
  Lemminds DS is my favorite. http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/ http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/
Hydraulix989 3y ago
I was the one who ported DOOM to DS back in high school; we were all in the same DS homebrew IRC channel together. A lot of my now-closest friends worked on the other projects (including the author of DS Linux) -- incidentally we all ended up working for various tech companies in Silicon Valley and ended up reuniting in real life decades later.

ndesaulniers 3y ago

I did a stream about this on twitch. Someone uploaded it to YouTube. Trying to find it Aha: https://youtu.be/mTo8yb6q4Lw?si=LAchs9gVSHRONxn2 https://youtu.be/mTo8yb6q4Lw?si=LAchs9gVSHRONxn2

monocasa 3y ago

Interestingly, based on some of the same uCLinux work as another story on the HN home page right now: 789 KB Linux Without MMU on RISC-V https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37822082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37822082

erik 3y ago

I made a few small contributions to this a long time ago. Nice to see that the website is still up! Probably the most interesting feature of this project was how it handled memory. The DS only has 4mb of ram. And there is no MMU, so swap isn't an option. But the gameboy cartridge port has 32mb of address space mapped to the bus. And there are homebrew/piracy cartridges that fill that space with 32mb of ram. Which is great, except that the DS can only write to the cartridge port on 16-bit aligned addresses. And almost all software will assume that 8-bit aligned writes will work. To make use of the expansion memory the developers ended up creating a patched GCC that would convert any writes to unaligned locations to an appropriate read, 16-bit write, and set of shift operations.

erik 3y ago
Another quirk: It was pretty common to load your homebrew software from a cartridge in the gameboy port. The cartridges would have some combination of ram and flash based storage or CF Card, and you could tell the cartridge to expose the storage or the ram as they were behind some sort of banking scheme. This meant that the storage system was mapped directly to the bus. So to save on ram, programs were run "in place", executing directly from the storage rather than being copied to ram first.
MenhirMike 3y ago
> And there are homebrew/piracy cartridges that fill that space with 32mb of ram. There's even an official one, the Opera Web Browser came with a second cartridge for the "GBA" slot to add 8 MB of RAM and a MMU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_Browser#Memory_Expansion_Pak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_Browser#Memory_Exp... (I've long lost the Opera DS cartridge, but the memory expansion is still in my DS Lite as a slot cover)
- Operyl 3y ago
  Haha! I always wondered as a kid why that was a requirement. The number of times I had to use the Opera browser to get around my restrictive mother, sigh.
- monocasa 3y ago

askiiart 3y ago

I remember looking into this a couple months back because I wanted to SSH into my server from my DSi, just for the lolz. I wasn't too invested in it, so when the wifi didn't "just work" I gave up, but I'd still love to get SSH working on that some day.

erik 3y ago
I believe most wifi routers have 802.11b support turned off by default these days. Otherwise, ssh should be doable!
snvzz 3y ago
>DSi Did DSLinux team ever manage to get it to work on the DSi? I still have my DSi and it still works, but I remember DSLinux didn't work with it.
- chungy 3y ago
  It should work fine in the DS backwards compatibility mode, but a native DSi port might be slightly nicer. The DSi has 16MB of system RAM. Following that, the Old 3DS had 128MB and New 3DS had 256MB of RAM.
- joshumax 3y ago
  Yes, it works, but there are some issues. The first one being that the SoC configuration runs in DS-compatibility mode which does not expose all of the available RAM in the DSi, and nds-bootstrap won't properly redirect I/O requests to the external SD card, which means you either need to embed the rootfs in the NDS ROM which won't persist changes, or use a flash cart and run the DLDI build instead.
  - snowram 3y ago
    Actually, someone made a working DSi mode WiFi driver some months ago. It is even used in a DSi compatible fork of ftpd. Very handy when transferring files on the SD card of a hacked DSi since it has WPA2 support unlike DS mode which is stuck with WEP. https://github.com/devkitPro/dswifi/issues/4#issuecomment-898803632 https://github.com/devkitPro/dswifi/issues/4#issuecomment-89... https://github.com/shinyquagsire23/dsiwifi https://github.com/shinyquagsire23/dsiwifi https://github.com/mtheall/ftpd/compare/master...shinyquagsire23:ftpd:master https://github.com/mtheall/ftpd/compare/master...shinyquagsi...

thosakwe 3y ago

I remember being 11 or so and installing this homebrew onto my DS... I had NO IDEA what Linux was at the time, but DSLinux helped me deepen my interest in computer science. So, thanks to the creators, and everyone who contributed code.

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5- 3y ago

also of note is a port of the inferno operating system to the ds, which makes for a rather nice platform. https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/Inferno_DS https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/Inferno_DS

circuit10 3y ago
For some reason Vodaphone wants me to confirm I’m over 18 to view this site
- prmoustache 3y ago
  What has vodaphone to do with that website? Do they provide you a lying DNS and send you to their proxy servers? I suggest using DoH and uncensored DNS servers. Oh and cancel that shitty provider.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    It’s meant to block “adult content” but it seems to count things to do with hacking as adult content with no obvious way to report a false positive See https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/02/considered-18/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/02/considered-18/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31248250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31248250)

RecycledEle 3y ago

I love the idea of Linux on a Nintendo DS, but the name will cause confusion with this: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

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luismedel 3y ago
In fact, I read it as if SDLinux (the original and only one) was ported to Nintendo DS :-)
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  By SD linux, do you mean the version embedded on those wifi-enabled SD cards that used to exist?
  - luismedel 3y ago
    touchè!

namuol 3y ago

Back in high school, I used to go “war driving” on my bike around my neighborhood with DS Linux running on an M3 cart. Almost forgot this existed; thanks for sharing, this was a fun memory to dig up. I still have my DS and my M3 cart but the SD card with my old build on it is long gone.

heywoodlh 3y ago

As a heavy Linux user myself, I was wondering what kind of functionality you would gain from running Linux on a DS (aside from the obvious learning experience and “because you can”). I found the FAQ[0] answers this nicely. Basically, it boils down to anything you can do on the command line within the resource constraints of the DS. Would love to hear any DSLinux users who would be willing to share stories about cool functionality they were able to achieve. [0] https://www.dslinux.org/wiki/DSLinuxFAQ.html https://www.dslinux.org/wiki/DSLinuxFAQ.html

tylergetsay 3y ago

Every once and a while I get the urge to run this again and host a webpage from it.. sucks this device lacked a lot of IO and the wifi stack is so weird

widforss 3y ago

I could never run DSLinux, I was in eighth grade and couldn't afford the RAM pack (just used a pirate card for games). But I printed out all of the documentation at the school library and read it until I pretty much new it by heart, and that became my introduction to Linux. I can't remember if this was before or after I managed to inadvertently install (!?) Knoppix on my sister's school laptop, but my passion for Linux was there well before I had the means to run it myself.

priteau 3y ago

What a nice surprise to see this on the HN front page! I was involved with DSLinux for several years. I maintained nightly-ish builds that I hosted on my website. I don't think I ever contributed any code, as my C and system programming skills were still rudimentary at the time, but I did a fair amount of testing and helping people in the community. I sold my Nintendo DS since then, but I still have somewhere the Supercard that I would use to store and boot Linux, which looks like this: https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/File:SuperCard_CF_V2.jpg https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/File:SuperCard_CF_V2.jpg Most of credit for the amazing work that made this possible goes to a few individuals, in particular Malcolm Parsons (pepsiman), Stefan Sperling (who later became an OpenBSD developer), and Amadeus: http://dslinux.org/wiki/ContactingDevelopers.html http://dslinux.org/wiki/ContactingDevelopers.html

haunter 3y ago

Tried it on my New 3DS XL. There is a single .NDS build so starts perfectly with TwilightMenu++ http://dslinux.org/builds/dslinux.nds http://dslinux.org/builds/dslinux.nds The problem is the touch keyboard is unusuable. Most likely because of the NDS v 3DS screen resolution difference, it's impossible to type on it. Took me a couple of minutes to type "root" but never managed to hit Enter :D

mintplant 3y ago

This was my gateway into Linux! I'm grateful to whoever decided to bundle the BSDgames [0] and Frotz [1] packages, for sparking a lifelong love of text adventure games and interactive fiction. Imagine my surprise as a little kid poking around the bin directory, typing "advent" into the prompt expecting a simple advent calendar application, and instead getting dropped into a whole other world [2]... [0] https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD_games https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD_games [1] https://davidgriffith.gitlab.io/frotz/ https://davidgriffith.gitlab.io/frotz/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

anthk 3y ago
Same as you, but first I played IF games under Winfrotz/ZX Spectrum. Later, I ran Linux with advent/battlestar and such under Frotz for Unix (among trek) and I was hooked.
- mintplant 3y ago
  How could I forget `battlestar`! The juxtaposition of the luxurious staterooms and all those corpses strewn around sure made an impression on kid me.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
You played text adventures by typing on a DS touch screen keyboard with a stylus?!
- mintplant 3y ago
  I sure did! We got pretty good at text-entry with the stylus when it was the only input method we had to work with. Like how people adapted to thumb-typing on smartphone touch screens.

CiaranMcNulty 3y ago

I've a few DSi in a drawer somewhere... My first question was whether I can turn them into a k8s cluster