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Forums - Sony - I'm thinking of using Linux on the ps3

phinch1 on 25 July 2009

The video said you can have most of it and leave 10 for the playstation as well, but obviously I wouldn't do that



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dahuman on 25 July 2009

I'm telling you again man, don't do it =X unless you have specific reasons to, it's not good for general purposes.



Xoj on 26 July 2009

it ran fast to be

but i know how to tweak ubuntu.



SickleSigh on 26 July 2009
bobobologna said:
waron said:
it seems pretty good but it doesn't work on ps3 at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofRYBnXfgYE
watch from 4:50

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y8WrkDRMuI

I don't know, Linux seems to be pretty awesome on the PS3.  The video you posted seems to be pretty uninformed.  GPU is locked, so obviously no hardware acceleration, including 2D acceleration.  Playing emulators natively at full screen can be slow because of the lack of any hardware acceleration.  However, the community has provided a tool that uses one of the SPEs to zoom in on the center of the screen, allowing emulators to run in "full screen" without taking a hit on framerates.  More information here:  http://www.ps3news.com/forums/ps3-guides-tutorials/how-setup-spe-scaler-tool-ps3-linux-100230.html

Youtube doesn't work on Linux PS3 because Flash doesn't support the PPC architecture.  There are reportedly some ways to work around this with plug-ins and such, but I can't attest to whether or not they work, or how well they work.  Although it seems to work pretty well based on this video (provided you put a little extra effort into getting youtube on the PS3 working):  http://www.savevid.com/video/youtube-working-in-yellow-dog-linux-60-on-the-ps3-with-how-to-in-the-description.html

Of course, Linux on the PS3 won't be able to do everything that Linux on a PC does.  Still, it seems to be pretty serviceable, depending on what you want to do with it.  Programmers might be interested in playing around with the Cell processor.  Others might want to play a lot of retro games through emulation.  And others might want a more robust media player, without having to rely on a PC to stream/transcode videos in formats the PS3 doesn't support.  There are a lot of possibilities with Linux on the PS3.  Just because it doesn't play CS or Quake 3, and it doesn't support flash (actually flash doesn't support the PPC) does not mean it doesn't work at all.

That would be sick if I knew how to run Snes emulator on Ps3.



AdventWolf on 26 July 2009

I was gonna do this but I have a small 40 GB HDD. psubuntu is a great site, it has all the stuff you need to get running. You can run all the emulators that use the PPC(?) structure. Or is it the other way around? I haven't looked into it in a while.



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dahuman on 29 July 2009
AdventWolf said:
I was gonna do this but I have a small 40 GB HDD. psubuntu is a great site, it has all the stuff you need to get running. You can run all the emulators that use the PPC(?) structure. Or is it the other way around? I haven't looked into it in a while.

well, the problem is the video hardware acceleration part, I don't think they've optimized it to the point where they can run everything full screen and fluently because the GPU is locked, but if you have a big TV, it's not as bad, you can always just run those emulators on your PC or laptop outputting to the HDTV and plug in a 360 controller though, it's kinda pointless to do those things on the PS3 atm tbh.



binary solo on 29 July 2009

It would be rather amusing to be able to play current PC ("Microsoft exclusives") games on the PS3 using Linux and WINE. I doubt it's possible though.

If there is a problem enough people want to have solved, someone will solve it. But I think enough people who really want to play the latest PC games have a PC already. I on the other hand am not going to fork out three times the price of a PS3 in order to play the latest PC games when my current PC and laptop serve all my non-gaming computing purposes quite adequately.

I plan on installing Linux on my PS3, though not sure whether to wait until I insert a bigger HDD, or run it from an external HDD (which I've read is a possibility). I have 80Gig at the moment, but I want more. It's mostly so I can surf the net on my nice big TV rather than my squitty 17" PC monitor. I hope I can get a Youtube workaround, because that does limit the utility of Linux on PS3 a bit.



“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” - Bertrand Russell

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace."

Jimi Hendrix

 

dahuman on 29 July 2009
binary solo said:
It would be rather amusing to be able to play current PC ("Microsoft exclusives") games on the PS3 using Linux and wine. I doubt it's possible right now, but the beauty of free open source software is that if someone wants to they have the freedom and access to source codes to do it.

If there is a problem enough people want to have solved, someone will solve it.

I plan on installing Linux on my PS3, though not sure whether to wait until I insert a bigger HDD, or run it from an external HDD (which I've read is a possibility). I have 80Gig at the moment, but I want more.

the problem is directx and other libaries, you won't see that anytime soon, by then the PS3 would be very outdated, and it's also not possible to run games with good quality on it because it has crappy memory restrictions and a weak GPU unless you just wanna do simple stuff.



AdventWolf on 29 July 2009
dahuman said:
AdventWolf said:
I was gonna do this but I have a small 40 GB HDD. psubuntu is a great site, it has all the stuff you need to get running. You can run all the emulators that use the PPC(?) structure. Or is it the other way around? I haven't looked into it in a while.

well, the problem is the video hardware acceleration part, I don't think they've optimized it to the point where they can run everything full screen and fluently because the GPU is locked, but if you have a big TV, it's not as bad, you can always just run those emulators on your PC or laptop outputting to the HDTV and plug in a 360 controller though, it's kinda pointless to do those things on the PS3 atm tbh.


If you don't have a decent PC, then yeah there's not much point other than to experiment. It's too bad that Wine doesn't run on it though, we could have got a lot of good PC games running. (Not new ones of course, but old classics)