It would seem that the Germans and friends have done it again! At the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, on the 28th of December Michael Steil and Felix Domke (Of Xbox-Linux fame) did a presentation titled Deconstructing Xbox 360 Security, and at the end of that, a person showed running his own code on the Wii, and also briefly explained what he and some friends had done (Pretty amusing, if you’re into security stuff), so do so.
I personally think this is fantastic, because the Wii is very very efficient in terms of power consumption, so running GNU/Linux or a BSD system on it, and essentially using it as the computer that it is, would be extremely cool. Plus one could possibly write some neat games for it. With GNU/Linux on the system, one could also use to stream movies and music, show pictures a little more efficiently than you can with the officially sanctioned functionality for that.
So hopefully, GNU/Linux and *BSD plus all sorts of homebrew will becoming to the Wii in the near future. Because the Wii is largely based on the GameCube architecture, it could be possible (If I’m wrong, I’d be interested to know why, I’m just guessing here since I’m not a programmer) to reuse some of the stuff done for GNU/Linux on the GameCube.
It’s gonna be a little interesting to see what Nintendo is gonna say about this, obviously they’re not gonna be happy about people potentially being able to easily run unauthorized copies of games, or write unlicensed games (They make money by charging developers wanting to make games). Although one would hope that they don’t pull an RIAA on the hackers, because since they make a fairly hefty amount of money on the hardware, more uses for it could potentially make them some extra cash! Heck, I’d be very interested in getting more than one Wii if I could use for things such as a small web server, IRC server or something like that.
You can see the Wii part of the presentation. that I mentioned earlier, on YouTube: The state of the Wii – 24c3.
As a free software guy, I encourage you to not use Flash, but use KeepVid.com to actually download the video, and then play it using something like MPlayer. This is also a very nice way to avoid the infamous “buffering …” of streaming video.