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PS3 Linux Now Installable

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the yes-because-it's-a-supercomputer dept.

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)."

4 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Almost by androvsky · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's a hypervisor running between the kernel and the hardware, so I don't think it's going to be an easy task to hack the nvidia ppc macintosh drivers to run on this thing. I got the impression from the documentation that the accelerator was pretty much locked off, but even if it wasn't, we're pretty much stuck waiting for nvidia to cough up a binary driver blob. Unless someone wants to port opengl to the cell spus. It couldn't be nearly as fast as the nvidia chip, geforce3 territory at best, but it could support any kind of shaders you throw at it.

  2. Yeah by eightball01 · · Score: 5, Funny

    But does it run... oh wait... it does!

  3. Re:PowerPC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

  4. IBM has a huge amount of Cell resources online by RichardMarks · · Score: 5, Informative

    To get a glimpse of what you have to look forward to when you install Linux on your PS3:

    http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/d ocs_documentation.html

    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...