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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.
But do you have to sign over your soul in blood to Sony??? They scare me.
** Disclamer: I am a disgruntled Dreamcast owner.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
...they had to go through the code and erase all changelog comments that would infringe on the DMCA.
> Why on Earth would I want to run Linux on my PS2?
Just off the top of my head, I would say there is a lot you can do. eg, many open source linux games can now be ported to the PS much more easily since all the neccesary linux libs etc will be available.
Also off the top of my head: With just linux, a framebuffer driver for the PS, an opendivx codec and a bit of work, it shouldn't be too hard to get a bootable linux based cd whose sole purpose is to play back the divx thats also recorded to the cd. In other words, an alternative to DVD that plays on any PS and is easily copied and distributed. This would be ideal for people wanting to send copies of their summer party video to their friends, none of whom own a pc, but all who have playstations.
When someone says that linux runs on the PS, don't automatically think that they are talking about a complete GNU/Linux system together with all the usual shells and servers etc. That will probably not be the case. I expect a bootable linux CD could be set up to go straight into a game from init. The user may not even know they were running linux at all.
This could be the start of lots of free-software games releases ported to the PS.
Does this mean that it'll move the OS Wars (Linux vs Windows) to gaming consoles?
Then again, looking at the menu system for the Xbox, I can honestly say I'd prefer windows to what MS is doing on their console system....
Wonder if Sony's Linux port will have wacky interface options?
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
NO! I CAN'T imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
I'm kinda curious what kind of I/O score the PS2 might be able to manage. While the power requirements might be kinda steep, it's a very small and *very* stackable mini server platform.
Of course, don't expect it anytime soon. The HD, modem, and broadband adapter peripherals have all been delayed until Spring.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
This will be a fun and cheap method for learning the MIPS architecture, I can only hope linux is also ported to the Gamecube so I can do the same for PPC ;-)
How the PS2 works - this is an awesome source... very informative, yet easy-to-read.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/ps2.htm
While Sony is really earns its bread in the liscensing market rather than the hardware market, it is still important for them to put units in consumers' homes, because that is the only way to build a userbase for PS2 games.
What is the additional cost for releasing a linux-enabled PS2 machine? Not terribly much. It's the sort of thing linux enthusiasts might release on their own in a few months, given a chance. By putting in this marginal amount of effort, Sony gets both a more valuable commodity and some brownie points among linux enthusiasts.
I honestly can't see a single downside for them. The remarkable point is not that the PS2 is capable of this but rather that Sony actually had the foresight to act upon it. That's the hallmark of a nimble corporation and speaks loads for their future.
Of course, Sony is also in bed with the RIAA and the dvd cca, so anyone who buys a PS2 is going to hell in my book, but that's your choice.
Ya.. if you knew anything about this you would know that it comes with a cable that plugs into a vga monitor, so if want yer high resolution, its comes in the box. Zeno
Its a cool hack but does it have a point?
AFIK the thing does not have a net connection shiped with it so you can not get any networking. Is there a printer port? Can you plug in a cdrom drive or a fd0/L120 device?
Sure you can use a spread sheet with it but what do you do with it after its created. Where can you save, print, send it?
I would like to see something like this with a distro amied at newbies. With interactive lessons on how to use all of the apps so that it becomes a "learn linux on your PS2" thing that allows us to capture the newbies before they get hooked on windows.
But unless this can escape the gravity of a cool novilty or hack that will not happen.
Ascii artist &
It's also nice to see a company do this. While it would be fun to hack the Xbox, this will be a nice solution to those just getting their hands dirty with Linux (myself included...Mac OSX has whetted my appitite. Next stop, YellowDog).
Kudos Sony!
----
Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
How hard would it be to port some emulators to this? I mean really, until FF 10 comes out classics may be the only good games you can find.
(On a side note I think that this is really damn cool. Not that it is on the PS2 but that someone managed to sell LInux)
Secondsun
I can pirate DVD's if it keeps my children off porn sitez.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
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.
Some are of course questioning WHY?
With a keyboard, mouse, Hard Drive, and Ethernet/Modem adapter, SONY may have essentially created the next cheap home computer, and they'll be able to push this onto the market as such with the right marketing.
You see- back in the days of the Commodore 64 a computer didn't have to have a completely dedicated setup for people. It was fine to have a computer just plugged into the TV for occassional gaming, BBS, and type-work.
The Playstation 2 can perform all of the modern equvilants of these roles, and it doesn't even REALLY need Linux to do it, but why complain that it uses Linux?
While I honestly DOUBT that Linux is going to be a major part of the Sony Playstation's acceptance as a general purpose low-cost computing device, I honestly do think it's a "Good Thing" for Linux. Think of the number of budding coders that could print their first "Hello World" on this thing? And while Microsoft may own the PC market right now they don't own EVERY market, at least, not yet, and there is room for a whole new level of personal computers. A market that hasn't been filled since the last of the Amiga 500's began to die off.
Dreamcast could've had that market, but they ignored it. XBox could have that Market, but Microsoft won't play their cards right (I don't think). Nintendo doesn't want that market or they would've had it a long time ago.
Sony. Linux. It bothers me, but I can see it happening.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I am going to wait for the Linux Hack of the XBox. A 766 Proccessor, 8 GB HDD and NVIDIA video, for $299, can't be beat this side of an E-Machine.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power - Benito Mussoli
What I wouldn't give to see the look on my bosses face when I show up with a truckload of PS2s and hand one to each employee as they arrive at work. Give me an X environment and a fast NIC and I'm there. I can see the new employee manual now... "No playing --insert your favorite game here-- during business hours." And yes I would prefer to navigate my spreadsheets with a joystick.
You forgot one thing:
Back in those days you could go to Toys R Us and get the practically complete guide to programming the Commodore 64, including the 6510 assembly language, and the schematic just for the hell of it. Now THAT was cool, unlike these crappy-ass computers of today.
I ain't buying a Linux powered PS2 until they give me the same thing.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
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.
linux shminux. just wait till Apple releases OS X 10.2 for the PS.
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
SDL has been ported to the PS2.
This will make amateur game development for the PS2 *much* easier.
Why do both MS and Sony want to control the broadband bridgehead into the living room? Because they can then become the toll-booth onto the distribution of electronic services. It may surprise people but Sony has acquired themselves a bank and MS own a controlling stake in a cheque clearing-house. Much like phone companies have to subsidise handsets and stick customers with the long-term contracts, everyone is gunning for a slice of the electronic services that businesses are switching over ... you don't buy airline tickets, you bid for a seat, insurance, superannuation, identity, membership of professional societies, job contracts, even social contacts (rolodex on steroids) ... all these are basically electronic goods that people will be willing to acquire.
The problems is making someone else fork out the capital for infrastructure, the smart people identify the bottlenecks and position themselves where the traffic concentration makes it worthwhile to extract their tax/toll/vig.
Nothing changed from highway robbery days except who gets to collect the loot.
LL
I wanna see a Darwin port to the Gamecube...
$199, no HD, but still... nifty.
GPL Deconstructed
Sony has answered our petitions to bring a Linux port to the PSX2. Many people who singed the petition, myself included, claimed that seeing Linux available on the PSX2 would prompt a purchase. I know I intend to, but in general, are we going to support Sony for supporting us? Are we going to encourage big companies to do what we ask by following through with our claims? Or is the general public going to just drop the ball and show Sony and other large tech corps that what we write in petitions is bullshit?
Why bother.
Okamoto also gave accolades to conference host Rambus Inc., saying that the memory company was one of the most important contributors to the design and manufacture of the PlayStation 2. "We defined the main application on the PlayStation 2 as MPEG-2 (video) decoding," he said. "The solution was dual-channel RDRAM (Rambus Dynamic RAM) because MPEG-2 decoding for high-definition images is very heavy." Each PlayStation 2 uses 32M bytes of RDRAM.
I must have missed something. RAMBUS actually did something useful other than crank out patents? Somebody illuminate me on this. I was unaware they had anything other than lawyers working for them anymore.
USB sucks for networking. It's designed for one-way data transfer, and bogs down if it gets much more sophisticated. Remember networking with serial cables on the mac, or null modem cables on the PC, that's why USB networking sucks, and hasn't been implemented.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
...an Amiga CD32.
Think about it...
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
Rambus has been around for quite some time. I believe they did some work in Nintendo's game consoles as well.
I want to be able to run Playstation 2 games on my Linux box. They have it all backwards. They need to release a Linux port of the Playstation 2. Now THAT would be something, even closed source and commercial, it would be a welcomed addition.
It has a PCMIA card slot, so you could put a laptop ethernet card in the machine
Actually it doesn't. The early Japanese versions (SCPH-10000, IIRC) did, but Sony axed this in favor of a proprietary interface of their own. If they hadn'd done this, someone would have probably already ported Linux to the PS2. Kinna makes ya think, doesn't it?
so you could put a laptop ethernet card in the machine.
Not only can't you, you won't need to, if the Japanese PS2 Linux Kit is any indication. The HDD that comes with the kit includes a built-in 10/100 NIC.
Back in the late 1980's Apple was afraid of anti-trust suit because the had hardware, OS, and at that time the most popular "Office" suite for their platform.
They spun off Claris and gave Claris the office suite. It had been called AppleWorks, then ClarisWorks.
Eventually after MS gained dominance in the Word processor market on the Mac, Apple bought Claris back, and rename the product back to Appleworks.
The starting price is MUCH less.. but, and this is funny, most retailers are ONLY offering "bundles" with certain games plus a couple extra controllers, and so on.
Thus the price you will pay is heaps more than the "real" cost of the XBox and HALO.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
a PS2 as a firewall :) I'd like to see the script kiddies root that machine.
Well, the PS2 already has a CD-ROM drive (duh), and it has USB and firewire ports on it, so you should be able to plug just about any modern PC perphrial into it, provided you've got drivers. There's also a Nice drive bay in back for extensions like Hard drives.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
well I signed the petition. I said i get one and now I will.
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I'm not the type to go off on a diatribe about how 'bad slashdot has gotten' and how it's 'sold out', but I'm starting to feel like while reading the site, I have to dodge commercials for Sony products. One day I'm reading about a 'call to arms' against the SSSCA and the record industry that's pushing it, the next day I'm passing over "news stories" that scream hooray Sony! Sony being one of the largest parts of the RIAA, and representing a very large amount of political contributions. Feh.
While the PS2's CPU has only a mere 300MHz clock speed, it is not an Intel architechture CPU -- it is a MIPS Rx000 (sorry, can't remember which model straight off the top of my head) by SGI (originally). It can execute more instructions in parallell than an Intel CPU can, in fact, enough to be faster than the XBox's 733MHz CPU. That's the same reason an AMD AthlonXP 1800 at 1533MHz can beat a Pentium 4 2000 in all tests but Q3A (Q3A seems to be optimized for Intel over AMD). Performance matters, not numbers. The clock speed is really meaningless when comparing CPUs of different architectures. MIPS (millions of instructions per second) is a much more accurate measurement. So, DivX, DVD, or whatever wouldn't be a problem at all for the PS2, since it can handle HDTV resolution DVD decoding/scaling. It would be MUCH slower to send uncompressed video (24bits/pixel*1280columns*720rows*30fps=79MB/s) over a 100mbit/s network (12.5MB/s theoretical maximum without protocol overhead) than it would be for the PS2's CPU to decode it locally, since DivX video is usually around 500KB/s for transparent quality at 1440x720 (I know - I use DivX to compress my high-res 3D animations from Bryce et al when I'm low on hard drive space). Firewire is only 40MB/s, so this would still be insufficient for uncompressed consumer HDTV video.
A solution to the problem with music today
AFAIK, Sony has not yet contributed the linux kernel changes they made back to the community.
I'd love to run Linux on my PSX2, tough. But it's not worth it if i can't re-compile my kernel and learn from looking through the source. That's the big point in OpenSource: contribute back to the community, not just take the source and be fond of saved developing time.
I also think that Sony is legally forced to reveal the Source as the Linux Kernel is GPL.
MIPS asm is hardly more obfuscated than C (I'll admit that's a slight exaggeration). For example, to load an integer into a register you just li register value
But you have to worry about manual register allocation and a hard-coded register allocation can stifle reuse and maintainability. Tuning your C compiler is far better in the long term.
why would Sony make gcc their standard compiler on the $10000 PS2 SDK's if it was entirely useless
Because it does a reasonably good job and because it's free. There does appear to be a good market in third party PS2 compilers though (Codeplay et al.)
Ok, lets break down the cost of this cheap computer...
Playstation 2 - 299.99
Hard Drive -199.99 (I am assuming, considering the shark drive is 119.99)
Ethernet Adaptor - 59.99 (Also assuming, using retail price for a Dramcast One)
Linux - 29.99 (??? No clue ???)
Total Cost - 590
So, for 590 you can get a computer that runs about the speed of a k62-233 doing anything but play games, when I could go to my locaL pc store and get a 700 or 800 MHZ machine (that can also play games) for less???? Yeah, thats a new definition of cheap alright.
Right, let's get this straight, from what I've heard it is a fairly complete linux system. It's basically a port of an oldish redhat distro. It installs on the hard disk that comes with the kit (40GB) so has a reasonable /tmp, which it needs, don't forget that this is a machine with only 32mb or ram. Swap city. Having said that it apparently runs pretty well and is more than capable of running your browser (also included in the kit is a broadband adaptor), word processor etc. Resolution is limited to 800x600 though.
Sony have a page with a couple of screenshots and a features list here
Which brings us to why Sony are doing it. Yes they have got a touch of microsoft envy, they like the idea of having one unit which does DVD, games, web, interactive content and office stuff sat under your telly that is made by them. But, this is open source not m$ so don't get too upset. More than that though Sony most likely want to encourage the return of the bedroom game coder.
Think about it, they've done this before with the netYarouze project (ps one that you could connect to your pc and download code to) and they're providing the system manuals with the linux kit. Forget porting linux games, this is a games console! There's no way you'll get decent performance through mesa et al on ps2, the drivers won't be optimised for it, don't forget, it's not a PC (remember 32mb main ram, 4mb VRAM!). You're supposed to be adventurous, learn how the ps2 works, see if all those developers are right about it being hard to code for, take up the challenge.
If you do it right ps2 is an awesome machine, you just have to remember what your target platform is (hint dynamic texture management). Sony are giving people the opportunity to get back to the good old days and make games at home, go on, you know you want to!
What an exciting opportunity for Sun to achieve a large market for its StarOffice suite.
ermmm...it has a hard drive kit.....that is where Linux will be.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
...that you aren't going to back that up. I mean, right now you're basically in the realm of supposition.
Was the 'HomeStation' rumor announced before the original PS2 Linux kit? I'm pretty sure it wasn't.
Vermifax
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Sony and TiVo have entered into a deal that will allow Sony to integrate (and even modify) TiVo's software and services into their entertainment products.
Anyone thought the work to port Linux onto US and European region PS2s could be in preparation to run Tivo Software on your PS2? Supposedly, FireWire is emerging as the defacto standard for sending digital video signals from digital tuners (terrestrial, cable or satelite) to other h/w (Your new TV set, or D-VHS, or in future DVD-RAM). PS2 is ready to take an MPEG feed, and the Hard Disk is on the way....
Any Thoughts? Andy.
great comment, i just hope you're wrong on one aspect:
I hope that despite M$'s objections, we get linux on the XBOX anyway, because as cool as the PS2 is, the XB is cooler...
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
I can't see how this is true. The 802.11b USB devices (they aren't cards, and not quite dongles. what the hell are they?) are getting to be much better than their PCMCIA counterparts. I would imagine networking directly would be even better.
-no broken link
For all the flack Rambus got for their (idiotic) patent-flinging, RDRAM actually does have a few advantages over DDRRAM, namely, higher throughput, but at the cost of higher latency. So, it takes its time to get going, but once it's started, it GOES. Which means, for applications needing to stream through a huge, contiguous chunk of data very quickly (such as, oh, full motion video decompression) RAMBUS actually has a superior product. (Although, IMO, still doesn't break even on the cost-per-performance mark.) I remember reading some specs on ArsTechnica a while back. (I think that's the article I'm thinking of...)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
You fuck up your PS2, then, cowboy. If I want expandability, I'll stick with my PC...
That's a good consumer. Good boy. Don't act like a hacker. Just consume the devices you're spoon fed and don't question what else they may be capable of doing or how to improve them. Good boy.
Speaking of sticking with your PC, you should probably just re-install Windows on it, since that's what they intended it to be used for. Everything on an Intel box after Windows 3.1 is a dangerous hack...
Does this mean I need to subscribe to a mailing list now to make sure my PS2 doesn't get out of date, and some bastard hacks into my PS2 making it unplayable?! I couldn't live without it! Oh wait yeah I can it got stolen =(
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