PlayStation 2 - Major progress, help me finish!

mattmatteh · Guru Joined: 10 Mar 2004 Posts: 449 Location: near chicago

some of the links on http://gps2.aura-online.co.uk/trac/gentoo-ps2/wiki seem to broke. i was looking at installing gentoo on the ps2. no idea how i missed this thread.

matt

Chewi · Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 9:23 am Post subject:

Many of the pages haven't been written yet. Let me know if any of the external links are broken.

mattmatteh · Guru Joined: 10 Mar 2004 Posts: 449 Location: near chicago

it was the install links that i tried. any idea when you will add to the wiki? not asking for much, perhaps something short.

i was just looking for the latest on how to install and where the files were. i suppose you just followed the gentoo mips install. not sure what to set the profile to. and i havent tried all the patches yet, i assumed there would be something more current.

any chance we can put this into an overlay?

are you in #gentoo at all ?

there is #ps2linux that i am in once in awhile all by my self.

thanks

matt

beissemj · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 3:16 pm Post subject:

Anybody know what happened to the wiki site? Doesn't seem to be online anymore?
_________________
Debian on a Dell latitude D600: http://d600.elwiki.com/
There is no such thing as a stupid question. They are just the easiest to answer.

Chewi · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 11:48 pm Post subject:

My server has been down recently. It should be up now though.

Edit: Oh damn, I just realised I screwed up the DNS whilst working on it earlier. It'll probably be down for another hour or two!

beissemj · Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 12:11 am Post subject:

Well good to hear the project isn't dead. =) I finally got ps2 linux (I wish there was a more legal way to get it other than bittorrent...) and am very interested in working on the project. I am in my last year of college and need a "Senior Design" project in order to graduate, and I may have just found part of it.

Summer school hasn't started yet, but I'm sure I'll be able to incorporate this into my project somehow (I'll ask my professor in two weeks). I'd probably have to get the equivalent of a live CD (or memory card) working in order to pass but maybe not.

I'm currently worried because I have a new model ps2 (v15) and am not sure how well an external usb HDD will work (speed wise) considering that the ps2 uses usb 1.x. I did successfully install a DMS4 S.E. Pro modchip and install Toxic OS. Unfortunately Toxic OS isn't open source, but I'm going to see if I can get ahold of the devels and see if they have any tips about loading stuff at boot time...

Also I saw your post about the montaVista kernel patches being released. That's infuriating considering you spent so much time grep/diff'ing through them. However that is good news because now we can figure out the PS2 kernel specifics. Have you had a chance to sort through that mess yet?

If not then that is the first place to start in order to get up to a 2.6 kernel (which would be my final goal at least). Once somebody figures out which modules are needed by the PS2 (it shouldn't be that many) then the work of changing those modules to interface from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel can start.

I guess my question is at the moment, what do YOU think the next step needs to be?

I'm going to see if I can install Gentoo tonight on my external USB hard drive. It's been awhile since I've used Gentoo (was around Xorg 6.8!) but I'm sure I'll pick it up again pretty quick.
_________________
Debian on a Dell latitude D600: http://d600.elwiki.com/
There is no such thing as a stupid question. They are just the easiest to answer.

mattmatteh · Guru Joined: 10 Mar 2004 Posts: 449 Location: near chicago

if you have the slim the you are going to have to use the network, like nfs. the usb on there is v1 ? and that is way to slow. not sure what to do about swap, that should be over the net too.

if you want to help, start learning the kernel, gcc, libc. look at the network,sound, ide, usb, and graphics driver on the ps2.

matt

mattmatteh · Guru Joined: 10 Mar 2004 Posts: 449 Location: near chicago

also, perhaps learn mips asm, the ps2 ee, and how the ps2 does graphics too.

matt

Chewi · Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 9:35 am Post subject:

beissemj · Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 11:21 pm Post subject:

beissemj · Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 4:03 am Post subject:

Well I've come to my first of (many I'm sure) problems, however this one is more a stupid hardware problem I think. My ps2 does not like my usb keyboard. (Its a cheapo Belkin) When I boot the ps2 the numlock key lights up but then when it start loading the kernel the light turns off, and I'm stuck at the select your language screen and the keyboard remains inactive.

Edit: Forgot to say that i can use the arrow keys & return when I'm at the blue installer screen, but then it stops working. Took me a couple tries but I finally was able to see that the kernel does indeed recognize the 2 usb ports when it loads, so I'm not really sure what the issue is... hmmmm.

Anyone heard of this? Could someone describe their normal keyboard behavior for me? I'm going to try and get a different one from work tomorrow, so hopefully that will work.

Update: Grr... I tried another keyboard (and every kind of unplug/plug combination I could think of) and it still doesn't want to work. I'm wondering if it has to do with the fact that's it's a ps2 slim. That doesn't really make sense to me kernel/driver wise but that's the only think I can think of.
_________________
Debian on a Dell latitude D600: http://d600.elwiki.com/
There is no such thing as a stupid question. They are just the easiest to answer.

garlicbread · Apprentice Joined: 06 Mar 2004 Posts: 182

try unplugging / re-plugging your keyboard back in again once you've gotten to the point where the keyboard isn't recognised
the 2.2 kernel that comes with the PS2 Linux kit has ancient USB support
sometimes it doesn't always pick up on devices already plugged in via USB and just needs the unplug / plug event to kickstart it into recognising it

gtbX · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Oct 2003 Posts: 126

Ok, got my PS2 back and decided I'd start hacking on it. Got a CodeBreaker disc and PS2xme, so I can load stuff onto it. PS2xme lets you load unsigned code without a mod chip - you just need some way to load game saves onto a memory card (some cheat code discs let you do this from usb drives) and a vulnerable PS1 game (of which there are many-all of my PS1 games should work).

Anyway, I thought that since ppl are loading homebrew on the PS2, why not straight-up Linux, withtout the RTE?

It turns out someone already did it
they even have a screenshot of a 2.6 kernel w/ gcc-4 on the PS2

very cool imo

Chewi · Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 9:54 am Post subject:

I'm lost for words. This guy has jumped light years ahead of anything else previously achieved. I wouldn't have believed it but he seems to know what he's talking about. I'm gonna find out a bit more...

jumico · n00b Joined: 19 Jun 2007 Posts: 14

I noticed the page about booting over the network is not up. If you could post this it would greatly be appreciated. If it hasn't been written yet than don't worry about it. Do i just have to edit fstab and the p2lboot files?

Chewi · Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 4:51 pm Post subject:

I didn't get around to writing that. You need a kernel with netboot support and all of the generally available PS2 kernels either don't have it at all or don't have it enabled. Writing these things would be easier if the kernel situation was a little more solid.

opopanax · Apprentice Joined: 30 Aug 2004 Posts: 244

So, I managed to get an old v1 ps2 with a hdd/network adapter, but I need to track down a hard drive. I'm thinking anythhing will work, up to, what, 120GB? Anyhow, I've been wanting to do this for years. I'm gonna try to track down the linux dvd and see what happens. I'll read through this thread and see what else I can find. I'll be back!!!

Any tips or ideas to get me started? Any hardware issues, or can I use any usb mouse/keyboard?

Chewi · Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 11:50 pm Post subject:

Pretty much any hard drive up to 120GB (except possibly Maxtor) and pretty much any USB keyboard and mouse. I hope you know what you're letting yourself in for.

opopanax · Apprentice Joined: 30 Aug 2004 Posts: 244

Ha! Did Al Gore know what he was getting into when he invented the internet? I think not!!!

Why, because it's addictive, or because it's just too frustrating? I plan on standing on the shoulders of giants -- that would be you.

I'll post here when I have problems!

Chewi · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 9:19 am Post subject:

It's just that we've gone backwards since my first post in an attempt to get more recent stuff working. That 2.6 kernel that was mentioned above only displays the first line. That's all. It's still quite exciting to me though.

opopanax · Apprentice Joined: 30 Aug 2004 Posts: 244

oh, great! I was hoping to be able to help get 2.6 working! Awesome. Not sure how much help I'll be, but I'll sure give it a shot.

Chewi · Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2007 2:41 pm Post subject:

Update. Inspired by Alex's thread at the ps2dev forums, I've been getting back into this myself. Unfortunately, it turned out that Alex had barely done anything to gcc at all and the fact that he was able to get the first line of the boot process to appear was probably down to a lot of luck. I was fed up with gcc 3.2.2, so after cleaning up binutils, I decided to have a crack at 4.2.0 myself. With a 2.6 kernel now in the works, I also decided to scrap 32-bit and go 64-bit. I recently made the switch to 64-bit on my PC so this doesn't scare me so much anymore. Instead of trying to migrate the entire patch at once, I started making what I believed to be the minimum number of necessary changes. gcc 4.2.0 now builds and it even builds uclibc 0.9.29 without any errors but there are some worrying warnings that I am trying to get to the bottom of. Check the thread if you think you might be able to help with that. That aside, the fact that binutils doesn't complain when building uclibc is a very good sign. Unfortunately, the only way I can test the compiler at this stage is through non-Linux homebrew stuff because we're a long way off a 64-bit kernel at this point.

yoshi314 · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 850 Location: PL

i always thought i would need special patches to use newer gcc on ps2.

i already compiled all the necessary hardware. guess i'll follow the guide pretty soon ^_^
_________________
~amd64
shrink your /usr/portage with squashfs+aufs

Chewi · Posted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 8:57 pm Post subject:

Huh? You DO need special patches. I'm writing the latest ones. And you compiled the necessary hardware?

Anyway, I have made some progress with gcc. In particular, I've been trying to get it to run home brew non-Linux stuff and I've been fixing problems at the assembly level. There's still some way to go but things are looking good.

yoshi314 · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 850 Location: PL