Blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii

Summary

If you are reading this message, the experiment below is still ongoing. This page was served to you by a real Nintendo Wii. You can check the Wii’s live status page for system load info. For a long time, I’ve enjoyed the idea of running general-purpose operating systems on decidedly not-general-purpose hardware. There’s been a few good examples of this over the years, including a few which were officially sanctioned by the OEM. Back in the day, my PS3 ran Yellow Dog Linux, and I’ve been searching for a (decently priced) copy of PS2 Linux for 10+ years at this point. There are some other good unofficial examples, such as Dreamcast Linux, or PSPLinux. But what a lot of these systems have in common is that they’re now very outdated. Or they’re hobbyist ports that someone got running once and where longer-term support never made it upstream. The PSP Linux kernel image was last built in 2008, and Dreamcast Linux is even more retro, using a 2.4.5 kernel built in 2001. I haven’t seen many of these projects where I’d be comfortable running one as part of an actual production workload. Until now. While browsing the NetBSD website recently, I noticed the fact that there was a ‘Wii’ option listed right there on the front page in the ‘Install Media’ section, nestled right next to the other first-class targets like the Raspberry Pi, and generic x86 machines. Unlike the other outdated and unmaintained examples above, clicking through to the NetBSD Wii port takes you to the latest stable NetBSD 10.1 release from Dec 2024. Even the daily HEAD builds are composed for the Wii. As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it. That workload is the blog you’re reading now. Finding a sacrificial Wii Our story begins at the EMF Camp 2024 Swap Shop - your premier source for pre-loved game consoles, cardboard boxes full of 56k modems, and radioactive orphan sources. I picked this up expecting to use it for ho...