# Making an ArchLinux platform for emulators



## Lobar (May 10, 2010)

Disclaimer: This thread has nothing to do with obtaining emulators or ROMs.  Moralize elsewhere plz.

Okay.  With my new computer in the works, but unwilling to simply throw my old box away (decrepit as it may be), my plan is to hook it up to the TV in the living room (the TV actually has a VGA input on it, so no worries there) as an emulator machine controlled by an Xbox 360 controller for playing old-ass games with company.  Being an older machine, I'm thinking ArchLinux would make a nice lightweight platform for this.  The problem is that ArchLinux, being a minimalist distro, doesn't even come with so much as a desktop environment pre-installed, which leaves me a little out of my comfort zone for the initial stages of setting this up.

This is further complicated by the fact that I don't have physical access to the router to run a cable to it, leaving me with no direct access to the repositories immediately following the install.  There's also no internal wireless adapter, but I have a Hawking Wireless-G HWUG1 USB adapter sitting around that I can use.  This is fine, because after everything's set up, the box never needs to connect to the Internet again.  Obviously, though, it needs a driver, and it needs to be configured and connected to my network, before I can install a desktop environment.

For desktop environments, I'm looking at LXDE, again for minimalism, but I'm open to suggestions.  Ideally, it would be something with a 10-foot user interface (probably something geared towards HDPCs).  Since I'll probably be setting up something like Lemon Launcher or AdvanceMenu as a frontend for my emulators, though, that isn't entirely necessary.

So, it would seem that these are the steps I need to take:

1) Download the HWUG1 driver, a configuration package and any dependencies it has to a flash drive prior to installation.
2) Install ArchLinux
3) Through the command line, install the driver and package(s)
4) Also through the command line, connect the computer to my network
5) Finally, install through the command line a desktop environment, window manager, etc. etc. from the repositories.

If I can get through these steps, I'm golden.  Can anyone help me get through them?


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## WarMocK (May 10, 2010)

Phew, that's a tough one bro.

Why are you going for ArchLinux anyway? How old is the PC? What specs?
there are lots of small Linux distros out there, and most of them should have the emulators you want in their repos.


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## FaSMaN (May 10, 2010)

Why not start with something a little bit more suited for the job, Puppy linux should do the trick its very light weight and optimised for slower machines and does have a very good low resources gui...

http://puppylinux.com/

or look here http://www.zophar.net/frontends/arcade.html for some decent front ends.

But if you really honestly want to do something from scratch and reinvent the wheel there's a few good open source kernals on source forge, you can even try porting one of the ones designed for the gp2x hand-held as its interface is already designed with emulators in mind, and I would presume would only require a very small foot print to run.


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## Apollo (May 10, 2010)

You really should just load Ubuntu on there, it works fine even on old machines.


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## Nollix (May 10, 2010)

Install Gentoo.


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## Lobar (May 10, 2010)

I guess I do have alternatives, it's just that ArchLinux seemed to be the best choice of the distros I looked at, initial setup difficulty aside.

The machine isn't ancient, but it was low-end when I got it five years ago.  Box is a Dell Dimension 2400 with a 2.4 GHz Intel Celeron CPU and 512MB of RAM.  It's falling just short of the performance I'm aiming for under Windows XP, so I was hoping a lightweight OS would make up the difference.



Nollix said:


> Install Gentoo.



I may as well prostrate myself before an Eldritch horror instead.


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## ArielMT (May 11, 2010)

Is it too modern even for Damn Small Linux?  At least then you'd have a FluxBox desktop to start from.

Those tasks seem fairly sensible to me, regardless of the distro chosen.


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## Runefox (May 11, 2010)

If I might make a suggestion, a Bluetooth dongle + PS3 SixAxis controllers + QtSixA = an interesting combination. Supposedly, the accelerometers (or joystick) can be used as a mouse stand-in, though I haven't tried it myself (I only went so far as pairing and testing my DualShock 3 (which, by the way, has axes for each pressure-sensitive button, which is extra-cool but limited in utility)).


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## Lobar (May 11, 2010)

Runefox said:


> If I might make a suggestion, a Bluetooth dongle + PS3 SixAxis controllers + QtSixA = an interesting combination. Supposedly, the accelerometers (or joystick) can be used as a mouse stand-in, though I haven't tried it myself (I only went so far as pairing and testing my DualShock 3 (which, by the way, has axes for each pressure-sensitive button, which is extra-cool but limited in utility)).



I've got nothing against the SixAxis but all my friends have XBox 360s and 360 controllers.


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