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Don't buy a PS3 simply for the sake of installing Linux on it.

I would certainly agree with that. As you say, there are much better deals, price/performance-wise.

The PS3 only has 256MB of system RAM and Linux does not run well at all on it...

...but this is a little overstated. Clever people figured out how to use the video ram as ultra-fast swap, which brings the effective RAM up to around 512MB. Still not awesome, but it makes Linux quite a bit more usable on the PS3.

There's also no PC emulator for consoles.

The PS3 runs DOSBox. And if you're willing to expand your definition of "PC" past Lenovo-compatible PCs[1], the PC Engine (called TurboGrafx outside Japan) is in Wii Shop Channel, and some games for the Commodore 64 home computer have shown up in the European Wii Shop Channel.

[1] Lenovo bought IBM's PC division.

Ubuntu runs on PS3, and there's now an accelerated video driver running on its SPU DSPs. I play HD (1080p) videos on my 50" HDMI DLP TV all the time, and they look fantastic.

But the driver is in beta. X itself needs the drivers to be improved, so video can play back in desktop windows, etc.

But with just a little more tweaking, the PS3 would be a fantastic MythTV frontend. $400 or less for 1080p, Blu-Ray, 5.1 optical audio out, Bluetooth/WiFi...

It's FOSS. If you help the project, you might just put PS3/Linux over the edge into a simple media terminal that destroys Windows and Mac attempts to dominate home media centers.

Ubuntu runs on PS3, and there's now an accelerated video driver running on its SPU DSPs. I play HD (1080p) videos on my 50" HDMI DLP TV all the time, and they look fantastic.

But the driver is in beta. X itself needs the drivers to be improved, so video can play back in desktop windows, etc.

But with just a little more tweaking, the PS3 would be a fantastic MythTV frontend. $400 or less for 1080p, Blu-Ray, 5.1 optical audio out, Bluetooth/WiFi...

It's FOSS. If you help the project, you might just put PS3/Linux over the edge into a simple media terminal that destroys Windows and Mac attempts to dominate home media centers.

I hope the appearance of the Cell in actual PCs, not just the RAM-hardwired and GPU-lockedout (and no PCI) PS3 will reignite official support of Cell Ubuntu. Until last year, Ubuntu was officially supporting the PPC-based Cell version of their distro. Now it's just a community effort that needs your help. Ubuntu is working, with some bugs (right now mainly the installer, and beta bugs in the Cell SPE video driver). If there were more diverse Cell PC HW, and a larger, more diverse developer community coming with it, there might be better Ubuntu. Since both the PS3 and this notebook are primarily useful as workstations and media stations, Ubuntu really is the best flavor out there that also keeps up with the other Linux desktop productivity apps.

From IBM's detailed press release [ibm.com]:

the QS22 boasts an open environment, utilizing the flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the primary operating system and the open development environment of Eclipse.

That means that a PS3 running Linux, even with its ridiculously low 512MB RAM, can be used as a $500 development platform for these CellBE BladeServers.

And, in turn, some QS22 SW might be usable on the PS3, if it can be ported to use the tiny RAM. Or if someone hooks an i-RAM bank to the SATA port as swap/ramdisk, using perhaps iSCSI over its Gb-e for storage.

There is an entire community dedicated to running Ubuntu on a PS3, at PSUbuntu.com. And you don't have to upgrade your HD from whatever size your PS3 came with, although of course it's easy and you can do it. The PS3 HW works right out of the box.

Right now is a good time to join the PSUbuntu.com community, because a new wave of developers on the ubuntu-cell maillist have just joined, and are uniting with the users at PSUbuntu.com to test and smooth out the PS3/Ubuntu distro.

And there is also a fairly new X/MPlayer driver that will render full 1080p HD video on the PS3's Cell CPU, that also needs just a little testing and integration.

What I really want to see is a PS3 running Ubuntu using the PlayTV PVR device that Sony is releasing this year. With Ubuntu running it, the PS3 could be quite the killer platform for all home entertainment.

And I hear it plays games, too.

The PSUbuntu website is a good resource for anyone who wants to run Ubuntu on their PS3:

http://psubuntu.com/

the QS22 boasts an open environment, utilizing the flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the primary operating system and the open development environment of Eclipse.

This seems to indicate that it WON'T work, but that information is a month old. Anyone have a better experience?

You can get Playstation 3s for under $330.

And they run Linux.

The PS3 has been running Linux on its Cell CPU's PPC core for several releases now, including several official Ubuntu PS3 releases. Sony does lock out the RSX graphics chip to Linux, but the Cell's 6 SPUs (pipelined DSPs) are wide open for development. And now that developers have ported video drivers to the SPUs, the PS3 is a hot little multimedia PC. I watch downloaded 1080P HD videos (and regular upsampled MPG/WMV/AVI/etc) right on the same 50" HDMI TV I surf the web (and watch Blu-Ray discs) and program with. And when Sony releases the PlayTV 2-channel DVB TV tuner for PS3 next month, I expect my Linux PS3 will beat TiVo at its own game, too.

The Wii is just getting started as "homebrew". Its HW isn't nearly as screaming as the PS3, nor as designed to be open for Linux. Hacking it sounds like a fun toy, which is why people buy the Wii. But the PS3 is already starting to be a Linux platform more interesting than even its gaming. A few more leaps forward on the PS3 and the Wii will look so 21st Century.

The PS3 has been running Linux on its Cell CPU's PPC core for several releases now, including several official Ubuntu PS3 releases. Sony does lock out the RSX graphics chip to Linux, but the Cell's 6 SPUs (pipelined DSPs) are wide open for development. And now that developers have ported video drivers to the SPUs, the PS3 is a hot little multimedia PC. I watch downloaded 1080P HD videos (and regular upsampled MPG/WMV/AVI/etc) right on the same 50" HDMI TV I surf the web (and watch Blu-Ray discs) and program with. And when Sony releases the PlayTV 2-channel DVB TV tuner for PS3 next month, I expect my Linux PS3 will beat TiVo at its own game, too.

The Wii is just getting started as "homebrew". Its HW isn't nearly as screaming as the PS3, nor as designed to be open for Linux. Hacking it sounds like a fun toy, which is why people buy the Wii. But the PS3 is already starting to be a Linux platform more interesting than even its gaming. A few more leaps forward on the PS3 and the Wii will look so 21st Century.

The PS3 is interesting because it's so much power in such a cheap box, but it's subsidized by Sony. I think Sony will be lowering prices less while reducing the subsidy more.

But where are the Cell PCs already? The PS3 is cute, but it's locked down with a Sony hypervisor, it's got no PCI or other expansion, only a single SATA connector, and a puny 512MB hardwired RAM (its Cell can rip through 512MB, peforming 64bit floating point math on it all, in under 0.0025s). Its RSX video chip is locked out from Linux, so no HW acceleration (and no addon videocard is possible).

IBM is now cranking out these chips. It lost Apple, its biggest CPU (PPC) customer, to Intel. Where's a PC built on a Cell that includes PCI-e, expandible XDR RAM, Gb-e networking, and a more open nVidia graphics card (or two)? Since the Cell is cheap due to its higher yields, a $1000 Cell PC could make a $1000 Intel PC (Mac or Windows/Linux/etc) look like a 286 with its extremely high speeds. Sony has proven it can be mass manufactured with mostly commodity parts for under $750.

Since Ubuntu already runs on Cell, a cheap Windows killer could take the Cell architecture to the top of the CPU stakes in record time from release. It would be a much easier/cheaper/faster target for porting PS3 games than Intel PCs. Apple, which supposedly dropped PPC for Intel because of heat:performance limitations, would have to look seriously at a return to PPC, especially since 45nm Cell with only a few SPUs could be a perfect fit for an iPhone successor. If not from Apple, then from someone smart enough to use Cell in the biggest market of all.

Even the Wikipedia SpursEngine article has much better info than that idiotic news coverage.

Most interesting is the claim that Linux drivers will be available for the SpursEngine. If the code that the Cell's SPUs run to process video is available, it could be ported to the PS3 Linux that has 7 (not 3-4) SPUs available, right onchip with a huge bus to the PPC CPU.

Also in 2003, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications built the PS 2 Cluster for about $50,000.

Any word on any improvements in the next Ubuntu release ("7.10", I guess) targeting PlayStation3 features?

What the PS3 needs is someone to port X/OpenGL and its (TV) graphics rendering libraries to the PS3's DSPs (SPEs). Then we can use any USB tuner and DVR SW we want under PS3 Linux. On a fast multimedia platform that's subsidized by Sony to be much cheaper for the performance and features.

Without depending on Sony not to lock us in with DRM or to snoop on us with spyware. If Sony can do it with their dedicated HW, the rest of us can do it with their opened HW and the open Linux platform.

I'd love to see someone port an open source Java class libary or VM's graphics library to render the graphics on the Cell microprocessor's SPE math processors, especially in PS3/Ubuntu.

Is there an open source Java OpenGL implementation? That would be a great package to see running on the Cell.

So they drop the price $50. That's how much one game costs.

What the PS3 needs is expandable RAM, to more than 256/512MB. Not for the games, though they'd probably benefit to become more complex. But to run Linux on it, of course.

How about a driver for Linux on the PlayStation 3, which would let the PS3 RSX chip actually work for Linux apps?

Right now PS3 Linux runs all display processing on the PPC core on the Cell, which needs to do a lot of other processing to keep the complex Cell going. Meanwhile there's an RSX chip that runs at 1.8TeraFLOPS, dwarfing even the Cell's 0.2TFLOPS. But Sony's Hypervisor virtualization layer that runs Linux hides the RSX from Linux. However, the RSX is exposed in some API, otherwise PS3 Linux wouldn't display on the HDMI port out of the PS3, and sound probably wouldn't work (probably also running on the RSX somehow).

Sony doesn't want the RSX exposed to Linux apps, because then Linux apps could compete with Sony-licensed games (without paying Sony the royalty that even subsidizes over 25% of the PS3 purchase price). But can't nVidia release a driver, or some kind of specs, that expose a 2D API for running X desktops? Sony's money all comes from 3D games.

Or maybe someone else has a way.

The PS3 is already "usable" by developers. It runs Ubuntu 7.04/Feisty right now. There are devkits for parallel DSP development. With the latest firmware and kernel, it seems that all the PS3 hardware, including Blu-Ray, WiFi and Bluetooth, is supported. With the exception of the RSX video chip, which is a glaring omission.

But though that chip's inaccessibility means 1800GFLOPS is sitting unused in each Linux PS3, there's still 200GFLOPS available in the DSPs. That's plenty of power, much more than in any other host for the price (or close to it), and more than multiple realtime video processing requires. Porting "CPU hog functions", like transcoding and mixing multimedia streams, to the DSPs, is precisely the model the PS3 is suited to. The PPC is for complex application and HW integration logic, pre/post processing the media computation that the DSPs handle.

So go check the PS3 Linux sites, including the DSP devkits and the projects using it. The platform is available now, but it won't produce apps unless people do something with it. That's what open source, like MythTV, is all about. Do something for yourself, share it, and the community will mutually benefit from the combinations.

I wanna see someone port MythTV's codecs to the PS3's Cell DSPs so I can use it as my PVR direct to my HDMI TV and 7.1 surround.

HDMI is a really fast interconnect, 10.3Gbps, even if it's only 1-way. The PS3 HDMI output is by far its fastest "I/O" (O, really), the only one in the class with its Cell processing power (to say nothing of its RSX graphics chip). With Ubuntu on PS3, I might be able to write code that tunnels data over HDMI. But where are the HDMI input cards (probably PCI-e) that can accept the "HDMI" data (really TDMS data), decode it, and use the encapsulated data I sent across?