Sunday, February 4, 2007

The WiiMux-WiiLi Situation

WiiLi has been standing as the primary source of information regarding the link between the Nintendo Wii and the GNU/Linux operating system. Unfortunately, there has been a lack of results. I am a channel operator on #wiili on the Freenode IRC channel and have watched weeks of nothing more than GlovePIE confusion and questions about an actual release from anticipated supporters. Hernick (author of WMD, python Wiimote linux driver) and myself spoke with Tuxido (founder of WiiLi) about delegating access to the server to allow for a few necessary changes.

  • Trac -- For their ticketing system and a cleaner WiKI
  • Subversion -- (Will get into that in a moment)
  • Ability to perform general maintenance (Tuxido was often gone for weeks at a time and critical changes have need to be performed)
We spoke to him on the phone via 3way and although he seemed like a great guy, he was very reluctant to distribute any amounts of power to our users. Hernick and I decided to produce WiiMux, an actual product. WiiMux is a distribution of software, libraries, and drivers all bundled into a Linux LiveCD that will allow interoperability between the Wiimote and the PC. (These are the preliminary steps before being able to produce an actual distribution for the Wii). We gained many supporters including those who administrate the forums and IRC channel for WiiLi. We were NOT intending to break away from WiiLi, in fact the name was originally "WiiLi WiiMux". Although Tuxido had nothing to say initially, he still slacked on giving out access to anyone. One time, he read logs where I (Triforce) had made some comments on his handling of the WiiLi project and he banned me from WiiLi.org. Afterwards banning some of WiiLi's top contributers for their simple aggravation with him. It has become almost a dictatorship, where we must sit back and wonder where our donation money has gone, where our leader has gone, and where his sense of judgement has gone! He is trying to declare WiiMux a rival group when all we are doing is producing something that WiiLi is not caring about! We run WiiMux differently, for instance, we delegate power freely, those with merit WILL receive the access they desire. We have meetings, utilizing Jabber VoIP and Gobby collabrative text editing sessions. We get our community involved! It seems as if WiiLi is slowly going to diminish itself to nothing more than an information hub with a database of Windows GlovePIE scripts, but we will move on. I have extended my hand in peace to Tuxido many times! It seems that he has lost his sense of judgement. We all have one common and unifying goal in this community and that is Linux on the Wii! He is banning top contributers and people with potential and great ideas! If you want to come be a part of us, come forward and send any of us an e-mail, reply to this post, join the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net and #wiimux), or meet us on Jabber (triforce.wiimux@gmail.com). Lets do something people, lets produce an actual product!

What is WiiMux?
http://wiimux.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6

How can I join?
http://www.wiimux.org/forums
irc.freenode.net - #wiimux
triforce.wiimux@gmail.com
Reply to this post.

Thank you.
-Triforce-