#itrunslinux

The GP2X? It runs Linux.

The GP2X is a South Korean handheld games console made by GamePark Holdings. It came out in 2005 - roughly a year after the Nintendo DS and the PSP, featuring roughly the same hardware capabilities. Two ARM cores - unusually, capable of overclocking - were supplemented by a whopping 64 MB of RAM, the display was roughly the same as the one on the DS, the battery life was decent - what's not to love?

This system was designed to be as open as possible. It featured virtually no first-party games, relying instead on the userbase to develop their own homebrew software. It became quite popular as an import in the mid-2000s, as it was an excellent machine for emulators. It could emulate virtually anything up to the original Playstation, albeit obviously it did some systems better than others.

As for the Linux system underneath it all, it was a fully featured OS hidden behind a custom UI. Hidden beneath was a version of Samba, a HTTP server, FTP and telnet. While the console itself didn't feature Wi-Fi, it could connect to the internet via USB networking.

Also notable is the expansion port. Users could use a multitude of special dongles to get composite television output, or to add USB ports to the console. Using a special breakout box, up to four devices could be plugged into the console at any one time.

The EVO Smart Console? It runs Linux.

The EVO Smart Console is another one of those products nobody asked for. Released in 2008, it was a Steam Machine before the Steam Machine was a thing; it's basically a tiny PC, with a controller, designed to be plugged into a television. It ran its own in-house fork of Fedora Linux and was designed as an open platform for easy video game development.

Unfortunately, it failed miserably, because the concept is inherently flawed. What Envizions, the company behind the EVO, failed to grasp is that a console lives or dies by its games. Unless you're Nintendo, you require heavy third party support throughout your platform's lifetime in order to keep it alive. Making a box and expecting your customers to provide the content for it is the best way of wasting your investors' time and money.

What didn't help were the hardware choices that went into it. It had an Athlon 64 X2 processor - a midrange chip that was on the market for two years by the time the EVO was released; coupled with it was an ATI Radeon 3200 - a very low-powered GPU designed for laptops. This made the system massively underpowered, even when compared with its console competitors.

The system could run Amiga games and reportedly, WINE didn't run that bad. Still, when you ask $250 for an unpowered device with no real third-party software support whose only purpose is to play video games from twenty years past, it's no surprise that the EVO died after less than two years on the market.

The people behind the EVO would later attempt to repeat their failure using Android as the base OS (because Android is famously known for the quality of its games). The project failed to gain traction, so the CEO started a new company and attempted to cash in on the Ouya's Kickstarter success by annoucing the OTON, a platform supposedly capable of procedurally generating its own games.

Needless to say, that failed too.

The PC-gaming-on-the-couch concept would later be revisited by Valve Corporation and their Steam Box platform, which also failed due to a lack of market demand.

The Nintendo DS? It runs Linux.

The DSLinux project has ported the Linux operating system to the Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite. Newer models such as DSi and 3DS might work in DS-compatibility mode. Apart from real hardware, DSLinux also runs on some NDS emulators, like desmume.

DSLinux is functional, has excellent documentation, and brings a wealth of useful Linux programs to the DS.

The Nintendo DS was an unusual beast - not only did it have two screens, it also had two different processors! An ARM9 and ARM7, to be exact. The ARM9 did the heavy lifting, while the ARM7 was there to handle Wi-Fi, sound and Game Boy Advance compatibility.

This port of Linux features a couple of basic utilities taken from Blackbox, as well as Irssi and Bitchx, for when you really want to be fancy with your IRC. Additional softtware can be installed by cross-compiling the source files along with the rest of the operating system into a new .nds file that flash carts can boot.

The Nintendo GameCube? It runs Linux.

Released in 2001, the Nintendo GameCube was an odd duck. Instead of using conventional DVD discs, it opted for a smaller, proprietary optical disc format, ostensibly to combat piracy. That didn't stop hackers from finding out several methods of running homebrew code on the console.

Internally, the charming little box contains a 485 MHz PowerPC CPU and a custom ATI GPU. The hardware was specifically designed to make programming for the system as easy as possible.

Linux was ported to the GameCube in early 2004. The console is powerful enough to support the X Window System and some SDL application - including, of course, Doom.

The GameCube was also the first home console to support stereoscopic 3D. Because 3D television sets were not widespread at the time, the feature wasn't allowed to be used outside of development, but one released game reportedly still supports the feature: Luigi's Mansion.

The Sega Dreamcast? It runs Linux.

The Dreamcast was Sega's last home console - and what a console it was! It was the first home console to support online multiplayer as standard - the base unit came with a 56k modem installed and an ethernet card was available as an add-on. Its powerful hardware and great line-up of games available at launch (Soul Calibur, anyone?) quickly won over the hearts of the gaming community worldwide.

Then, the PS2 happened and single-handedly forced Sega out of the home console market. Some people are still bitter about that.

Nevertheless, the beautiful gray box still persisted in homebrew circles, thanks to the complete lack of copy protection on the system. You see, in order to fight piracy, Sega decided to buy a proprietary optical disc format from Yamaha: GD-ROM, which held roughly a gigabyte of data on a single disc. This, however, proved completely pointless, as the console was quickly discovered to run homebrew code (and, of course, pirated games) off standard CD-ROMs, with no hardware modification requied.

As for this Debian port, I can't find any information on it online. The link in the video is long dead, and the actual page didn't allow archive.org to preserve it.

The Xbox 360? Yeah, it runs Unix.

The Free60 project aims to put Linux, BSD or Darwin on the Microsoft Xbox 360. In March 2007 an execution method involving a bit of jiggery-pokery on the motherboard and a copy of Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Game was discovered, and shortly after install scripts for Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu came out.

Unfortunately, stock Xboxes lost the ability to run unsigned software through that method in 2009. Any consoles which were tampered with to accept Free60 before the patch got promptly bricked. The above tutorial concerns consoles with a JTAG or RGH modchip.

In 2011, a new method was discovered, dubbed the Reset Glitch Hack.