Booting Linux

This guide will walk you through installing Adèlie on your Wii U; this is a fairly new distribution so app support is not perfect yet

Requirements

• A USB flash drive and a a SD card to boot the system from, please note that the Wii U only supports USB 2.0 so the system will not feel too responsive due to slow transfer speeds, But it’s the easiest to set up for new users, It is recommended to use a separate card than the one used for Aroma as this will clear everything on the SD card
• A physical keyboard and mouse to use the OS with
• Note that a 2,5” SATA adapter board works but is not recommended overall
• A Linux based system to properly format the external drives later on(SD method only)

Setting up the installer

SD card method

1. The next steps will require a Linux system and being comfortable with how partitioning drives work
2. Run sudo umount --all-targets /dev/mmcblk0p1
   • This unmounts the SD card if it was automatically mounted by the operating system
   • Alternatively, eject it using your file manager
3. Run sudo cfdisk -z /dev/mmcblk0
   • This will open the cfdisk tool to partition the drive
   • -z will erase the partition table
4. Select the dos label type
5. Create a new partition and set the size to 500M and the type to primary
6. Move down to the empty space and create another primary partition. It will autofill the remaining size, Select Write, then Quit.
7. Run sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/mmcblk0p1, this will format the first partition as FAT 32.
8. Run sudo mkfs.ext4 -O ^metadata_csum,^64bit /dev/mmcblk0p2
   • this will format the second partition as EXT4, disabling options unsupported by wiiu-linux.
9. Your partition table should look like the following:
   • /dev/mmcblk0
     ├── /dev/mmcblk0p1 [boot partition] 500MiB fat32
     └── /dev/mmcblk0p2 [root partition] remaining space ext4
   • Now you should be able to open the FAT32 partition on a file manger, get This and extract it into that partition
10. Next, run:
    • sudo mkdir -p /mnt/wiiulinux
    • sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /mnt/wiiulinux
    • sudo -i
    • cd /mnt/wiiulinux
    • This will mount the new root directory at /mnt/wiiulinux, create a new root shell, and move to /mnt/wiiulinux. If this directory contains a lost+found/ folder, it can be removed with rmdir lost+found/.
11. Next, get This Tarball, It is the actual Linux system you’ll be using, Run:
    • cp path/to/partition_tarball.tar.xz /mnt/wiiulinux to copy the tarball to the destination in /mnt/wiiulinux
    • tar xpvf partition_tarball.tar.xz --xattrs-include='*.*' --numeric-owner -C /mnt/wiiulinux
    • extract the tarball to /mnt/wiiulinux 2
12. Run sync and wait for the command to finish.
    • Although the root partition is all sat up, you still need to config petitboot to use the SD card as the root partition
13. nano /mnt/wiiulinux/boot/petitboot.conf; this will open the petitboot configuration.
    • Edit the args line to args root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootwait
    • Type ctrl+o to save, and ctrl+x to exit
    • nano /mnt/wiiulinux/etc/fstab; edit this to comment option 1 (/dev/sda1) and uncomment /dev/mmcblk0p2

This should be enough to get the system booting into the root shell; run exit to go to your normal user, you want to change the hostname or timezone before booting Linux for the first time, you could also do that here.

USB method

1. Get the bootloader files and place them on a SD card, you should have a Linux and a fw.img file
2. Get the flashable disk imageand put that on your USB drive with something like Etcher

Booting

1. Reinsert your SD and press Gamepad button B while booting, you should see a white on black screen, if you see anything else reboot and try again
2. Navigate to fw_image_loader and press A
3. Linux will load into “Petitboot”, the linux-wiiu bootloader. Give it a moment and your USB, SD card etc. should appear with the name of the distribution
4. Use a physical keyboard to navigate up Adèlie and press enter to boot it, You’re done!

• Note:
• The Wii U Wifi is NOT supported yet on Adèlie, if you want to use internet on your Linux system, please use A ethernet to USB adapter or android/iOS tethering(requires jailbreaking on iOS), to verify if the devices are getting picked up, run ip .1<\code> post boot