| numonex said: Installing Linux onto PS3 is not an easy task to perform. I could not not be bothered doing it. I have heard Linux does not offer much to the PS3 besides allowing you to use the PS3 as a PC. 256MB is not much memory to run OS on it. |
Actually, the installation is extremely easy. Put the DVD in, follow instructions on screen when it asks for timezone, language etc. Easier than indstalling, say, windows XP on any PC.
The tricky part is that you need to have some GBs partitioned for it on your HD, thus if you didn't do that as soon as you got the console, you'll have to backup your data -> format -> partition -> restore your HD data. It's certainly not something every user can do in complete peace of mind, but it's about as hard as doing the same on a pre-existing PC.
It actually runs quite well, memory limits notwithstanding. As to what it offers, I can see three main uses:
1) academic, for those who want to learn developing for the Cell architecture, or need cheap parallel stream processing
2) media playing, for those formats that are unsupported by the PS3 OS
3) gaming, as long as the GPU is not really needed and the software rendering is enough. Emulators come to mind.
