.. some other huge title I've forgotten right now.

It's starting to move..

 

http://www.keshi.org/moin/moin.cgi/PS3/Debian/Live

 

and

 

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/ppc64/ps3/

 

Both versions still very basic, but they're up and running now.

Okay, you can put Linux on PS3. Is there any practical reason to do this beyond the cool factor?

Application development is very convenient on a GNU/Linux platform (completely my biased opinion, of course). For people that want to write, distribute and share homebrew apps such as games, media frontends and encoders/decoders, a familiar and powerful platform is a huge deal.

It certainly does seem that many think that way. My tool is used in Windows, but all of our development is done on Linux.

Okay, that is a definite plus. If we could put Linux on the PS3 is there other OSes that could be installed or is Linux based material is it?

I think the distributed development methodology would be very conducive for multithreading, too.

Okay, I am convinced that I should, at some point, get a Playstation 3. Probably right after I get myself a HDTV and do a serious system upgrade for my PC.

Okay, that is a definite plus.  If we could put Linux on the PS3 is there other OSes that could be installed or is Linux based material is it?

I believe Yellow Dog Linux (the "official" PS3 Linux distro) co-exists peacefully with the PS3 primary dashboard OS, and you can choose to boot either of the OS's during startup.

Okay, I am convinced that I should, at some point, get a Playstation 3.  Probably right after I get myself a HDTV and do a serious system upgrade for my PC.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Yeah, I think the HDTV is the priority for me too. Nothing less than 40 inch. And at the rate prices are going down you'll probably be able to get a decent 40-50 inch HDTV for under a grand by next christmas.

I believe Yellow Dog Linux (the "official" PS3 Linux distro) co-exists peacefully with the PS3 primary dashboard OS, and you can choose to boot either of the OS's during startup.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It has an OS other than Yellow Dog Linux? I was under the impression PS3 was running it exclusively.

IIRC the primary PS3 Dashboard's kernel is also Linux-based (although I don't understand how they can get away with not distributing the source code). YDL is a full-featured Linux distribution that you can install and dual-boot into.

It would be cool if we could install Windows on a PS3. If we could do that I would then ship it to Bill Gates. HA!

(although I don't understand how they can get away with not distributing the source code).

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Probably the same way NVidia distributes its closed-source Linux driver.

I think the idea angshuman was talking about was that if the kernel is Linux-based, it'd be part of the numerous open-source licenses, such as the GPL, that Linux is distributed under.

 

As far as I know, there's nothing "Linux-based" about the closed-source driver that nVidia makes, outside of the fact that it's designed for Linux.

I think the idea angshuman was talking about was that if the kernel is Linux-based, it'd be part of the numerous open-source licenses, such as the GPL, that Linux is distributed under.

Yes, but they don't have to modify the kernel source. Chances are that what they need is drivers for PS3-specific hardware. If implemented as loadable kernel modules, GPLing the code can be avoided. It is the practice used by many embedded Linux vendors.

 

As far as I know, there's nothing "Linux-based" about the closed-source driver that nVidia makes, outside of the fact that it's designed for Linux.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It is not that simple actually. There is a lot of controversy whether a kernel loadable module is a part of the kernel or not, because it "interacts with kernel in a very intimate manner" [Linus Torvalds]. I haven't been following this debate for a couple of years now, so I can't tell what's happening today.

Edited January 19, 200719 yr by Diamond

Linus has swapped sides recently, too, hasn't he? (Isolating him from the community he created.)

What about getting $840 worth for $840?

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=72194

Edited January 24, 200719 yr by karka

While at Eurogamer I found this article:

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=72081

 

What about getting $840 worth for $840?

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=72194

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Yeah, but an equivalent PC would cost

Edited January 25, 200719 yr by Surreptishus

Yes, but the Brits gave us Bonnie Langford so they deserve to get ripped off.

Edited January 25, 200719 yr by Sand

The Playstation 3 seems to be having a few serious problems:

 

Sadly what he has said is something that anyone who knows me on these forums will know I have warned about ever since I began doing work on PS3 (I contract so sony can't really slap me with an NDA as I'm not affiliated with them, only certain projects I can't mention ha!).

 

The PS3 is great for small projects due to the hard and fast memory split, which doesn't hamper casual games.

 

PS3 needs to stream content for anything larger like resistance or motorstorm and as I've mentioned before, blue-ray is no good at that full stop. As a result we had to compress the sh** out of all graphics and then uncompress on the fly, before moving the uncompressed stuff to graphics memory and...yep we get framerate issues!

 

This will be true of any PS3 project. We are getting better at arranging the data on blue-ray to facilitate efficient streaming but, can do jack about the slow seek speeds of the disk drive itself. No wonder the British devs have been gagged. In the circles I move in we were all more than vocal about the crap sony have handed to developers.

 

It really does feel like they made a blue-ray player and then though oh heck it's supposed to play games too isn't it! The cell can actually play a blue-ray disk without even accessing the gpu so maybe this is why they thought the cell was all powerful. Not realising that de-compressing blue-ray movies and reading a disk serially is not what a games oriented processor needs to do! For games it's all about the texture storage, ai based on branching instructions, good predictive branching in short almost the opposite of what an spu does well.

 

Developers almost without exception (it depends on the game you write) have scaled up their projects from the proof of concepts that you see at shows like E3 (well did see anyway) simply don't fit into PS3 memory and then stall once you try to stream the data from the disk. Haveing done this myself, I bet there are developers at most PS3 software houses who have had to go to their boss and say "Er you know we said march, well er...no way that's happening. We couldn't get the big track to perform above 30fps when we streamed the data for it and did all the compression/decompression etc. etc. for the realtime game and 1080p er unless everything fits into 256mb of graphics memory well forget that too!".

 

For the record the 256mb for data is not a real restriction yet. I've yet to work on anything that was above about 100mb or so for actual game code (usually less than that even)

Looks like Epiphany might have been right about one thing.

Why a hard disk can't be used for temp texture files? Or PS3 doesn't have one?

I was thinking about that too. I mean PS3 comes with either 60gb or 20gb HD.

Edited January 26, 200719 yr by kirottu

Or even some flash memory ... "