Practicalities of Fedora Core 5 on PS3
Submitted by Taran on Mon, 12/04/2006 - 00:07
HardwareZone has a good writeup on the Sony PlayStation 3
...Overall, it was an interesting experiment trying Linux on the PS3. The rawness of the installation could be attributed to the fact that we were just trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: the PPC version of the Fedora Core 5 we installed was not meant for a PS3. Terra Soft and its just released Yellow Dog Linux should prove to be more user friendly, since it is tailored for the PS3 and hopefully it will have all the required drivers. After all, most of our issues stemmed from the lack of graphics drivers and getting that right would be a major step towards making the PS3 a viable platform for Linux.
Sony has already sounded off to the industry and its open platform looks credible at the moment, so you can expect to find more Linux based developments for the PS3. Yellow Dog Linux is the first and hopefully not the last in the line of such Linux distributions. The rest is up to the open source community, though the PPC nature of the PS3 may be a hindrance, as most projects are likely to be for the x86 architecture. There's no way (yet) to run Windows through a Linux emulator like Wine for instance, since the architecture is radically different.
In the end, similar to the state of PS3 games and Blu-ray at the moment, there is a lot of untapped potential in the PS3. The idea of getting a full-fledged Linux based computer along with a game console and Blu-ray player appeals to the geek within us, while we would certainly like to see emulators like MAME or ZSNES running on the PS3 just for kicks. However, at this moment, there is also a lot of work to be done. We'll update this article (or better yet, dedicate a whole new article) once we get a copy of Yellow Dog Linux on our PS3 and maybe there will be some progress then.
Great article, worth the read.
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