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firefox is heavy, even "lightweight" forks. it is a fully fledged webbrowser which simply doesn't come cheap. what you could have tried instead are falkon(more feature-rich but still lighter), dillo(very bare-bones), or lynx (command line web browser)
The version of Seamonkey in pkgsrc tends to have relatively good support, although the version of Gecko it uses is starting to show some cracks (read: it doesn't support WebVR or whatever dumb new standard Google is pushing for)
LÖVE is a framework for making 2D games in Lua. Various versions of LÖVE have different splash screens that show when a game isn’t loaded, and that looks like one of them - most likely Not Pacman’s files didn’t load
It's not until someone manages to go recursive. Using a wii to somehow launch dolphin emulator, to launch the wii menu again. Normally that should be impossible, but dumber stuff was accomplished, so I just set that as the real "bs limit".
In the late 90s a friend gifted me a Sun 3/80 with no OS. Figuring out how to get NetBSD on it was a lot of fun and I eventually had it running X11. It was dog slow though and at some point I decided to recycle the whole lot.. ugh. If only I'd known what Sun 3 stuff would be going for now.
I love how many weird projects that serve no practical purposes other than "because it's cool" exist for old consoles, especially the Wii. I installed Linux on my Wii and the experience waa absolutely unbearable. Download speeds were nonexistent. Just updating the repositories took several minutes. Pretty much anything I wanted to do wouldn't really work because the Wii was too slow or the screen was too small or something. Looking forward to seeing if NetBSD is any better, maybe I'll try it as well!
I can't speak firsthand for the Wii, but I had a similar experience with Linux on a 1GHz G4 as you, and had a much better time when I tried FreeBSD on it. So the BSDs do seem to be able to manage lower powered systems better, maybe has to do with being a microkernel rather than a monolithic kernel like Linux is?
@@hk4757 Good cards can handle it for a while. Cheap cards not so much. Even a good quality Samsung card may only last a few thousand cycles. The controller's ability to shuffle writes around is what keeps them lasting longer. One long, huge write across the card every day is less damaging than if you've filled the card up with static content, then hammer a 500mb segment over and over every minute.
NetBSD defines "supported hw" and "runs good!" in very .... abstract and optimistic way. Essentially if a machine boots and appears to stay up. I don't think it's really an OS designed with end-users in mind - very important in bridging EOL or exotic HW into a second open-source life though.
The Nintendo Wii can do everything when you install Homebrew on it. A Unix/Linux device? You got it! A media player capable of playing videos, music and (on older Wiis) DVDs? It sure can do that! An FTP server? It’s a fine one at that! A current day Pizza ordering device? Why not! And it plays games and Homebrew features as well! What can’t this Wii do? Once you Homebrew a Wii, I can’t think of a reason why you would want to uninstall Homebrew on the Wii after it’s on the device?
We tried DVDs on one Wii for the purposes of swapping a hardware DVD player out for a game+DVD unit in one spot... It played the DVD, sort of. But the menu was broken and the playback was very low frame rate. That was a really long time ago, so maybe it improved since. The DVD drive was fine - I ripped quite a few games with that same drive.
yeah man nbsd has been legit forever. some dude like twenty years ago had it running an apache server on a small board inside of a toaster, and it still made toast
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as an iPad, is in fact, a tablet, or as I've recently taken to calling it, a tablet computer. iPad is not a synonym for tablet, but rather a brand name of a specific tablet made by Apple. There are many other manufacturers of tablets, just like there are many other manufacturers of personal computers besides Apple.
Aw man, you where actually looking at bastet (bastard tetris), which works on the CLI and is quite fun: It actually always guesses which one is going to be the worst piece to pull out. For web browsing you could do something like lynx, which is CLI-text only. You can also use links, which in both CLI and X can display images. And I don't know, there are zillions of terminal applications that can make this a daily driver: Mail clients like alpine or mutt, image and PDF viewers like ida and fbgs (all come with the fbi package), nice file managers like mc (midnight commander), video playing with mplayer (which can also be used to record with a webcam if you plug it one, and can also pass video into aalib for ascii output videos or cam), music with moc.... So many possibilities!
13:40 in neofetch it says that the system was using 87 mb out of the 88 available even before launching X11. I'm just baffled that the browser even launched at all without the system hanging all the way through. Probably netbsd does swapping though
if it did swapping neofetch should output the swap size, no? Probably it is just regular memory management sheananigans as a lot of things failed to work I believe there was a huge process purging happening in background...
2:37- That 'nonsense' is probably the actual .gz file. If you right-click and 'save link as' it should work. Its not meant to be viewed by a human. Its data.
@@arjix8738 ; Its binary data. If it contains a null character (which it would) then the display would stop - it would only display up to the first null character. Try going to a DOS prompt and 'type word.exe' - it won't print every character to the console. It'll beep and fart then stop after a bit.
An exercise in why... because why not. Thanks for doing this. I want to see Mac OS on there again. Need to disable the anti-aliasing on the text for that one next time to prevent the funky text display.
This is cool, I would be wondering how well Dillo or Netsurf browsers would work, and if you have something like Abiword, could you print to a printer.
You should try arch power. It's a continuation project of the og wii linux, except it's based off of ofc arch. It runs better and has EXTREMELY dense documentation
Large numbers of small servers use it, both 32 and 64. Some people don't want to switch to Linux just because they upgraded from their old XServe to POWER9.
Michael MJD trying to run NetBSD on the Wii, next MetroByte will be trying to run Win95/98 on it and Action Retro will be trying to run classic MacOS or Haiku. XD
You said in the beginning that the GUI is not usable but the CLI works well. There are LOTS of CLI programs that would have been good to show off including games, audio programs and even web browsers. Why wouldn't you show off any of those?
I wonder if hardware accellerated video works, and if a swap file can be set up. It might also be worth checking for a lighter weight browser than firefox such as NetSurf.
With a Unix-like OS, links or links2 might be available. It is a cli-based web browser. Most likely only Links will work, not links2, because links2 uses the ability in new terminals to display simple images. Links does not.
The slowdowns (and Arcticfox being very very slow) is probably because the Wii ran out of memory and was using swap space instead..? Maybe? Strange it only has 88MB to play with! Still and incredible project!
Epiphany, Lynx or net surf would have been better browser choices. Probably also slow though. Interestingly I had a Browser for the Wii (an official thing) that worked pretty well back in the day.
A bit upset you didn't host a webserver on it. Be fun to see how many simultaneous connections it could handle. I wonder how Doom would run on it? It couldn't be _that_ bad, right? Right? I also wonder if the slowdowns were due to swap being used? I wonder what the speed of the SD Card reader is? Also also, I wonder how compiling stuff on it would be.
It's no big deal, but I knew for a fact any graphical web browser (Outside of maybe Dillo) wouldn't work. Resource-constrained is one thing, but no 2D acceleration... Yeah, not happening. Was confused by the comments about LÖVE as I hadn't watched in full but now I get it, neat. Not Pacman seems kinda like a 2D Monkey Ball, so that's cool
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Wii
No. Just *no.*
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
It's a new experience for me! 😊
THUMBS DOWN!!!
Pretty soon we’ll be able to turn our Wii into an air fryer
KFConsole at home
@@monikabixho7752 hahahaha
Just run regular firefox and other intensive programs on netbsd on homebrew and it will be a air fryer
you clearly don't own an air fryer.
My Mom would love this idea.
firefox is heavy, even "lightweight" forks. it is a fully fledged webbrowser which simply doesn't come cheap. what you could have tried instead are falkon(more feature-rich but still lighter), dillo(very bare-bones), or lynx (command line web browser)
oof I misread that second one and had to do a double take
i thought the CLI web browser was called links
@@LemonYerg lynx and links are two different TUI web browsers. There's also elinks, w3m, chawan, and some others
I use w3m
The version of Seamonkey in pkgsrc tends to have relatively good support, although the version of Gecko it uses is starting to show some cracks (read: it doesn't support WebVR or whatever dumb new standard Google is pushing for)
Whaaat, a currently and officially maintained Unix distro _for_ the Wii?
@@adoggewokepupper wii
Like we say in french "Wii"
@@Inconito___ J'aime la Wii. Oui oui
of course it runs NetBSD
NetBSD runs on anything.
LÖVE is a framework for making 2D games in Lua. Various versions of LÖVE have different splash screens that show when a game isn’t loaded, and that looks like one of them - most likely Not Pacman’s files didn’t load
More famously, Balatro was made using LÖVE.
olympus (celeste mod thing) also uses love i think?
NetBSD, the Doom of operating systems. If it exists, it can run NetBSD.
truly is, lol
Tiny Unix? It can run on a Famicon.
@@xanderplayz3446 Might check that out
Android phones?
The Dreamcast can run it ?
The Wii is probably the most violated console of all time.
It's not until someone manages to go recursive. Using a wii to somehow launch dolphin emulator, to launch the wii menu again. Normally that should be impossible, but dumber stuff was accomplished, so I just set that as the real "bs limit".
just followed by the Xbox and Xbox 360.
wii is definitely a console of all time
@@xTunis1aFF wii
In the late 90s a friend gifted me a Sun 3/80 with no OS. Figuring out how to get NetBSD on it was a lot of fun and I eventually had it running X11. It was dog slow though and at some point I decided to recycle the whole lot.. ugh. If only I'd known what Sun 3 stuff would be going for now.
I love how many weird projects that serve no practical purposes other than "because it's cool" exist for old consoles, especially the Wii. I installed Linux on my Wii and the experience waa absolutely unbearable. Download speeds were nonexistent. Just updating the repositories took several minutes. Pretty much anything I wanted to do wouldn't really work because the Wii was too slow or the screen was too small or something. Looking forward to seeing if NetBSD is any better, maybe I'll try it as well!
I can't speak firsthand for the Wii, but I had a similar experience with Linux on a 1GHz G4 as you, and had a much better time when I tried FreeBSD on it.
So the BSDs do seem to be able to manage lower powered systems better, maybe has to do with being a microkernel rather than a monolithic kernel like Linux is?
@@kaitlyn__L FreeBSD does not have a micro kernel, but might have better hardware support for the G4.
@@kaitlyn__L All BSDs use a monolithic kernel, just like Linux
@@MyReetkever huh, thanks. Could’ve sworn I read it loads kernel extensions at boot time.
@kaitlyn__L yeah Linux does to but that's doesn't really have anything to do with being a microkernel
I immediately thought blue screen of death when I saw the title.
Wii
Might as well be called NetBSOD when running on the Wii
Wii are back!
You're playing a dangerous game boy.
*ba dum tss*
@@Bananenmann wii
@@abdalnablse10 switch your attitude before I kick you out of the playstation
@@ahmede92 Hold on hold on, let's DS-clate the situation a bit.
Poor SD card screaming for its life while system writes swap file to it non stop 🤣
they can handle it easily. cameras write 4k images on them all the time lol they have good read write speeds and endurance.
@@hk4757
Good cards can handle it for a while. Cheap cards not so much.
Even a good quality Samsung card may only last a few thousand cycles. The controller's ability to shuffle writes around is what keeps them lasting longer. One long, huge write across the card every day is less damaging than if you've filled the card up with static content, then hammer a 500mb segment over and over every minute.
@@tin2001 youre correct but it can last a decent bit... My guess is around 3-4 years considering its a good quality one.
NetBSD defines "supported hw" and "runs good!" in very .... abstract and optimistic way.
Essentially if a machine boots and appears to stay up. I don't think it's really an OS designed with end-users in mind - very important in bridging EOL or exotic HW into a second open-source life though.
MICHAEL YOU DIDNT RUN DOOM ON IT!!!!
and Half life 1 !!!
@ IKR?!
The Nintendo Wii can do everything when you install Homebrew on it. A Unix/Linux device? You got it! A media player capable of playing videos, music and (on older Wiis) DVDs? It sure can do that! An FTP server? It’s a fine one at that! A current day Pizza ordering device? Why not! And it plays games and Homebrew features as well! What can’t this Wii do?
Once you Homebrew a Wii, I can’t think of a reason why you would want to uninstall Homebrew on the Wii after it’s on the device?
The only reason I could think of is if hombrew breaks. But then you would just reinstall it
@@kingzombie951that has happened to me, thankfully it was just a soft brick
We tried DVDs on one Wii for the purposes of swapping a hardware DVD player out for a game+DVD unit in one spot... It played the DVD, sort of. But the menu was broken and the playback was very low frame rate.
That was a really long time ago, so maybe it improved since. The DVD drive was fine - I ripped quite a few games with that same drive.
In fairness to Arctic fox: in 2024, "ageing systems" probably still carries an expectation of at least 128MB of RAM 🤣
"Can I turn a Nintendo Wii into an Intellistar?" should be your next upload
This is incredible. I hope they get WiFi support in, because this would be super handy for a simple server.
yeah man nbsd has been legit forever. some dude like twenty years ago had it running an apache server on a small board inside of a toaster, and it still made toast
Micheal MJD in 2034: Installing Windows 16 on the toaster!
Now that's a video title worth clicking. Of course the Nintendo Wii needs to run NetBSD.
I had a Sun Sparc Station IPC (25 MHz and 48 Mo ram) from 1995, and NetBSD was the best OS I got running on it.
I saw you trying out netbsd on literally anything and I clicked so fast on the video I almost knocked my iPad off my desk.
@@vomytdaug wii
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as an iPad, is in fact, a tablet, or as I've recently taken to calling it, a tablet computer. iPad is not a synonym for tablet, but rather a brand name of a specific tablet made by Apple. There are many other manufacturers of tablets, just like there are many other manufacturers of personal computers besides Apple.
Apple user vs Android user fight
Aw man, you where actually looking at bastet (bastard tetris), which works on the CLI and is quite fun: It actually always guesses which one is going to be the worst piece to pull out.
For web browsing you could do something like lynx, which is CLI-text only. You can also use links, which in both CLI and X can display images.
And I don't know, there are zillions of terminal applications that can make this a daily driver: Mail clients like alpine or mutt, image and PDF viewers like ida and fbgs (all come with the fbi package), nice file managers like mc (midnight commander), video playing with mplayer (which can also be used to record with a webcam if you plug it one, and can also pass video into aalib for ascii output videos or cam), music with moc.... So many possibilities!
17:06 at long last, gaming on the wii
It's amazing what they were able to fit into such a small pool of memory back then.
pkgin is to pkg_src what apt is to dpkg
21:35 "lets boot BACK into, 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓰𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓱𝓲𝓬𝓪𝓵 𝓾𝓼er in𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓯𝓪𝓬𝓮" - Michelle DJM
24:42 "browser web browser" i mean yeah it is a browser
Niceee! More of such stuff please!
13:40 in neofetch it says that the system was using 87 mb out of the 88 available even before launching X11. I'm just baffled that the browser even launched at all without the system hanging all the way through. Probably netbsd does swapping though
if it did swapping neofetch should output the swap size, no? Probably it is just regular memory management sheananigans as a lot of things failed to work I believe there was a huge process purging happening in background...
Fun fact: The Tetris featured here is available in Linux (at least in Ubuntu/Mint), and the package is called bsdgames.
You could try setting up a swap partition to expand the available RAM and mayyyybe things would run a bit faster
That is freaking nuts!
2:37- That 'nonsense' is probably the actual .gz file. If you right-click and 'save link as' it should work. Its not meant to be viewed by a human. Its data.
it doesn't look nearly enough to be 1.3 Gib of data though, unless it got interpreted as some weird unicode and most of the bytes were hidden
@@arjix8738 ; Its binary data. If it contains a null character (which it would) then the display would stop - it would only display up to the first null character.
Try going to a DOS prompt and 'type word.exe' - it won't print every character to the console. It'll beep and fart then stop after a bit.
Anything Nintendo wii homebrew is just cool, thanks for the video
@@tailsprower9542 wii
Hey Michael i really do love this video and i want to see more netbsd videos from you in the future. :)
Thanks jonathan steadman.
We need tandy deskmate in the wii
When i saw the Title of the Video i knew exactly what i was gonna do the Rest of the day
An exercise in why... because why not. Thanks for doing this.
I want to see Mac OS on there again. Need to disable the anti-aliasing on the text for that one next time to prevent the funky text display.
could you maybe get netsurf running on it as a much lighter web browser? and also does it have some kind of swap to extend that tiny ram?
This is cool, I would be wondering how well Dillo or Netsurf browsers would work, and if you have something like Abiword, could you print to a printer.
You should try arch power. It's a continuation project of the og wii linux, except it's based off of ofc arch. It runs better and has EXTREMELY dense documentation
I wonder if you wake the system up a little bit with defining a swap space on the SD card and adding that into the bootloader or using swapon?
Surprising how smooth it was for a MJD video lol
I just started to watch this video, this is really facinating, i didnt even know that BSD supported powerpc
Well openbsd and freebsd have ppc ports i believe
Large numbers of small servers use it, both 32 and 64. Some people don't want to switch to Linux just because they upgraded from their old XServe to POWER9.
I actually did this, I installed the X11 server and messed around with running GUI apps on it, very slow but it worked
Michael MJD trying to run NetBSD on the Wii, next MetroByte will be trying to run Win95/98 on it and Action Retro will be trying to run classic MacOS or Haiku. XD
You said in the beginning that the GUI is not usable but the CLI works well. There are LOTS of CLI programs that would have been good to show off including games, audio programs and even web browsers. Why wouldn't you show off any of those?
I love Wii homebrew
I wonder if hardware accellerated video works, and if a swap file can be set up. It might also be worth checking for a lighter weight browser than firefox such as NetSurf.
This was a experience... A waiting experience, but a experience non the less
Love is the engine the game is made in.
Can it run doom on NetBSD ?
Amazing video!
BTW, IDK if it'd work on BSD, but FastFetch is significantly better than NeoFetch
That Wii is still dead-on detailed & boosting-up nice memories.
With a Unix-like OS, links or links2 might be available. It is a cli-based web browser. Most likely only Links will work, not links2, because links2 uses the ability in new terminals to display simple images. Links does not.
have you ever try seeing what minios is?
Every time Michael says "neofetch" my brain keeps hearing "Neopets."
and then there’s me who thinks of neofox as soon as someone mentions neofetch
19:15, no its love2D. a lua framework used for game development. My favorite is not-Tetris.
Great stuff but it may be worth trying to enable swap or zram (if NBSD supports it) to make the experience less unbearable. Maybe revisit one day?
i like watching your videos there fun to watch
Try this on a wiiu via vwii, use the program to unlock the processor speed, dont know if it gives access to more ram.
19:15 love is a Lua based rendering engine for games, that screen means it probably broke lmao
I remember installing Wii Linux to try to run checkra1n years back before windows builds, couldn't get a power PC build lol
How many browser tabs can it open
Certainly not 1
The slowdowns (and Arcticfox being very very slow) is probably because the Wii ran out of memory and was using swap space instead..? Maybe? Strange it only has 88MB to play with!
Still and incredible project!
Can you make a video on PSBBN? It has been revamped in 2024 by the translation group
Epiphany, Lynx or net surf would have been better browser choices. Probably also slow though. Interestingly I had a Browser for the Wii (an official thing) that worked pretty well back in the day.
Is using a wii for a minecraft server valid? is it worth it at all?
No, not at all. The Wii has a total of 88mb of ram and a highly antiquated PowerPC CPU. It is not capable of running a Minecraft server at all.
@@99domini99 I can dream lmao
Sure it is! If you don't mind using disk storage for memory and running at probably 1 tick per minute hahahaha @99domini99
It might run on a wii u, and since that uses a vm for wii backwards compatibility... you might get around the memory issues.
128 megs of RAM really isn't enough to do stuff nowadays.
i thought the wii only had 64MB?
@@Sam-th4jlneofetch claimed 88, apparently there's 24 MB 1T-SDRAM and 64 MB GDDR3 SDRAM (according to Wikipedia)
@@Sam-th4jl Yeah, I misremembered.
Man i found this tech channel in late 2021 and i don't regret it. I love how Michael explains things in such good detail. At least for me.
I wonder if the Lynx web browser would work on here. Thats pretty lightweight.
Why FF and not NetSurf or Dillo?
OMG I WAS JUST THINKING ABOUT THIS
A bit upset you didn't host a webserver on it. Be fun to see how many simultaneous connections it could handle. I wonder how Doom would run on it? It couldn't be _that_ bad, right? Right? I also wonder if the slowdowns were due to swap being used? I wonder what the speed of the SD Card reader is? Also also, I wonder how compiling stuff on it would be.
Is pihole possible?
of course it runs netbsd
LÖVE is a game engine, not a company! Well, maybe it also is. But it's known as a Lua powered game engine!
I'm sure if you use Konqueror you'll get usable browser performance
i have an Extra Wii somewhere in a box, maybe i should give this a go.
lol I forgot that Wii used a power PC chip. I wonder how Amiga OS 4 runs on it
Very sick! Commenting on a galaxy S6
Interesting. I suppose I can try that if I ever wanted to make wii games for whatever reason.
If you start stuff from the xterm you can sometimes see what's going on. :)
Don't forget the biblically accurate xeyes.
Also what's with that neofetch palette? It looks like apple 2 composite artifact colors.
Love is the engine. It's what balatro was made in.
Is it compatible with FreeBSD?
No. Very different OSs.
88mb of RAM. How the hell did anything run with so little memory available?
Pretty useful since the Nintendo Wii servers have been discontinued
Make a swapfile?
awesome!
Love engine runs? Balatro time!
I'd suggest trying Links on these very low resource machines.
I'm guessing text based browsers weren't available?
Great video either way
Sure - PkgSrc contains e.g. w3m and lynx.
It's no big deal, but I knew for a fact any graphical web browser (Outside of maybe Dillo) wouldn't work. Resource-constrained is one thing, but no 2D acceleration...
Yeah, not happening. Was confused by the comments about LÖVE as I hadn't watched in full but now I get it, neat. Not Pacman seems kinda like a 2D Monkey Ball, so that's cool
Can you run Dolphin on there? Then you can play Wii games on it too! 😂
I thiiiink openbsd has a dolphin package, no idea about netbsd
THE PACKAGW WASNT A LIE
I wonder how well this would run in Dolphin.
maaaaybe stick lynx for web browsing in netbsd on a wii.