Slashdot Mirror
Sony Annouces Linux PS2 Port for US
krismon writes "Sony has announced that it is gonna release the Linux port(old Slashdot article) for the Playstation 2 in the US, after selling out SUPER fast in japan." I saw this running, it's pretty impressive.
Has anyone been able to get the PS2 under linux to talk to a another linux box via USB? Is the USB hardware on the playstation supported in sony's linux port?
A couple of megabits a second is nothing to sneeze at, a lot of things could run full speed under X at 2Mb/s.
The firewire port would give far better speeds, but every recent PC has USB.
Currently I have a box with TV out which gets lugged into the living room occasionally to play movie files in various formats & xgalaga on the TV. Having a PS2 as an X-term would be a far more convenient (and cheaper) idea than a box with a GeForce with TV-out. Things that chew serious amounts of CPU (eg. DivX) could be run on the real box in another room and piped to the local display on the PS2. After a certain point the bandwidth of firewire would be desireable.
i'll give you one word for the best reason for this port. Mozilla. By porting Linux to the PS2, a port of Mozilla becomes trivial, and Sony doesn't have to spend the mega bucks to create a web browser. You just have to create a skin which looks decent on a TVs limited resolution, maybe an image proxy which downsamples the pics so they're viewable on a TV.
As for your question about expandablity, remember those USB ports. USB is fairly well supported on Linux, so pretty much any supported Linux device, such as storage controller, network card, input device, etc suddenly becomes a PS2 device.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
Ive used it, and its SLOW
PS2 doesnt have much memory and its unexpandable anyway, so things like building a kernel take all day while the thing swaps into the stratosphere... if youre going to develop for this thing, you really want to cross compile. You dont want to self-host build at all.
CPU wise, the R5900 @ 294mhz is roughly equivalent to a K6/233. Please, dont argue about what this CPU is "theoretically" capable of. Right now GCC is very unoptimized for this architecture, so a K6/233 IS what this thing is going to perform like, unless you want to hand code MIPS ASM.
Its very cute, but the Mesa HW implementation is rather incomplete and binutils has various bugs preventing lots of stuff from linking properly.
Oh yeah, it's also expensive as hell (compared to what the equivalent $$ would buy you in x86 hardware)
To me, its mainly a curiosity, nothing more. Dreamcast Linux is far more interesting -- and far cheaper.
The main reason everyone I know who has bought PS2 linux is for the VGA adaptor so they can play PS2 games in hires ^_^;
Still, it's nice that Sony did the port.
Owning the hardware and software doesn't break the antitrust laws. Using the marketshare from one in order to leverage into the other *does* break the antitrust laws.
The U.S. Antitrust laws don't make it illegal to have a monopoly in the USA. They illegalize a small subset of practices which have a large impact on consumers and competitors.
Keeping