I’ve had a Nintendo DS for almost a year now. It’s an excellent piece of kit. Small, good build-quality, not too expensive. I’d not played on it a for a while, what with work being busy, Anarchy Online keeping me addicted and minor programming projects outside of work. Chatting with a brother’s friend led me to a cool set of devices you can buy for the DS – one being the R4 card, or ‘Revolution 4 DS’. After some initial investigation, I found the latest R4 card for £40, which isn’t too expensive; I purchased one and started searching the web for what I could do with my DS and my new gadget. Inevitably, I wondered if I could get a web browser or an SSH client running. After a couple of searches on the web, I was directed to DSLinux, a small project aimed at creating a GNU/Linux distribution for the Nintendo DS. As soon as I had downloaded DSLinux, I was hooked – it worked out of the box and was exactly what I expected.

DSLinux

Loading DSLinux was pretty simple. It was just a matter of mounting the USB key (an adapter that has a slot for a microSD card) and installing the relevant ROM from the R4DS CD-ROM. Once i’d done that, I copied the ‘dslinux.nds’ ROM to the mounted USB card, unmounted it and then plugged in the microSD card into the R4DS cartridge. Powering up the DS and selecting the ROM was fun – DSLinux ran first time without any interruptions. Here’s a picture of it running.

I’ve yet to get wireless running under DSLinux. Thankfully it does have the ability to use the DS’ pre-defined WLAN configuration (that’s set by using the ‘WiFi’ options in compatible games), however my Wireless router does not play well with the DS (it’s listed as unsupported on the Nintendo website). Another issue is that due to me using the R4 card (as opposed to other hardware mentioned here), DSLinux cannot write to the media (the microSD) to save any settings i’ve applied whilst running. That means I have to create /etc/rc.conf each time I want to use the net connection (which isn’t available at the moment).

Overall i’m really impressed with DSLinux. It’s yet another example of how well Linux is developing, its flexibility to work on all types of platforms and architectures, and finally – its sheer geek factor :) I definitely recommend checking this project out; I know i’ll be keeping a keen eye on any new releases…