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PS3 Linux Now Installable
Quinton writes "Around midnight Pacific time on the 17th, Sony updated their Open Platform website needed to install PPC Linux on the PS3. The FTP Site contains the CELL Linux ADDON CD image, which has the bootloader (kboot/otheros.bld) and instructions needed to install Fedora Core 5, PPC. A full install from DVD takes about two hours. Most all hardware is supported except for graphics accelerator support (framebuffer only, up to 1920x1200)."
In theory, what would stop us (besides Apple's legal dept.) putting the PowerPC Mac OSX on it?
The same thing that prevented people from installing the PPC OS X on any other non-Apple PPC hardware. Namely, lack of support for the hardware itself. (Hint: just because the code is compiled to a specific processor doesn't mean that it automatically has hardware support for all of the other various chipset components--it just means it knows how to talk to the processor.)
it'd be easier to just do Mac-on-linux instead
http://www.maconlinux.org/
they are. Yellow Dog seems to be the only distro branding it as "linux for the PS3" but it sounds like you can use pretty much any PowerPC version.
To get a glimpse of what you have to look forward to when you install Linux on your PS3:
d ocs_documentation.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/
Best option is getting the $499 20gig model and buying a 100+ gig drive to upgrade the machine. The PS3 will partition the disk for you right from a menu and then you just follow the instructions they give you for the distro of your choice. People who just got their machines this morning already have things going and are posting pictures and results.
There is a full set of all the normal Linux dev tools that you get with any distro but there also is the Cell devkit - which you can get right now to check out although you won't be able to run anything of course.
Cell programming is incredibly cool...
Too bad you're wrong about that binary format. The Cell's PPE is a PowerPC; the SPEs are the cell execution units.
Well, you might be right, but just not because it's not PowerPC, because it is PowerPC; however, AFAIK it's a somewhat stripped PPC. It's certainly no G4, let alone G5.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course I remember the PS2 Linux kit, I have one.
This is different, it requires no additional hardware, is free, and is available at launch.
You have access to the SPUs. There's a filesystem interface for getting at their memory, dma state, mailboxes (spufs) and a higher level library on top of that (libspe).
-Q