Slashdot Mirror
How to Turn a PlayStation 3 Into a Linux PC
MahariBalzitch writes "Popular Mechanics shows step by step guide on how to install Ubuntu Linux on a PlayStation 3 and still keep the PS3 gaming functionality. Now I just need to get my hands on a PS3." Not bad specs for the price, either, since Blu-Ray players still aren't cheap. And though the article calls the procedure "somewhat complicated," it's a lot simpler than was installing Linux from floppies not so many years ago.
http://psubuntu.com/wiki/InstallationInstructions/
This is a good Ubuntu installation wiki for PS3.
You're right that this isn't news, but it actually does have a processor that is designed for general-purpose computing; it's called the PPU (64-bit PowerPC processor blah blah blah). There are 7 OTHER SPU's (6 available in Linux) that have been optimized for vector processing. *Those* aren't general-purpose. But, Linux doesn't even need to see those to work. It can just run on the PPU.
The PSUbuntu website is a good resource for anyone who wants to run Ubuntu on their PS3:
http://psubuntu.com/
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Also no access to built-in WiFi or Bluetooth hardware (VM doesn't export it)
;))
Not true. Yellowdog has had wifi drivers in place for several months now, and I got wifi running on a Gentoo install on my PS3 as well. I haven't attempted it, but I've read that other people have accessed the bluetooth hardware as well and even gotten the PS3 controllers working in Linux. (Link, though I haven't tried it myself or even really read over it.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
I bought a PS3 with a similar intention about 6 months ago. I installed Yellow Dog, which works great out of the box, but the media support is bad because of the lack of hardware acceleration and the Cell processor isn't too hot as a general purpose CPU.
I think the answer is that there isn't really a lot of point in trying to use Linux for this purpose anyway. Sony's media support in the PS3's native operating system is actually quite good. Just run a mediatomb server to provide the data, or otherwise plug in a hard drive directly to the PS3 and it works great.
Yes, you can play movies in VLC in Linux on the PS3.... as long as they are NOT High Definition. without 3d hardware acceleration and low ram, running Linux on the PS3 is painfully slow and sluggish. I tried to play the open source, open movie Elephant's Dream in HD with VLC on the PS3 and it barely ran. it was so choppy it was unwatchable.
I love linux and use it as my Primary Operating system, but I feel sorry for people trying out linux for the first time on the PS3 because its just frustrating. Not only is it really slow but many applications are either are not supported with the PPC processor or you have to compile them yourself.
It's because the Torque engine is unavailable for PS3 yet
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
are you aware of the linux and osx ports of xbmc that are underway? while they're not quite to the standard of xbmc on the xbox just yet, they've come a long way in the year they've been working on it. I think I'll be swapping my xbox for a much quieter linux pc with specs actually capable of playing back HD videos, just as soon as they get the tv and movie library modes working the way they do on the xbox.
TIAEAE!
Must be another CO day here. While we are at it, let me add my totally obvious comments. Instead of spending atleast 400-450$ on a PS3, you can build yourself a proper PC with components from newegg and download Ubuntu and install it for a superior Linux experience. What's that you say? You want a Blu-ray drive? Here's one that's not so expensive.
You don't want a BDROM and you can't be bothered to put together a PC? Say hello to Zonbu and their line of line of cheaper machines.
Zonbu not upto your taste? Perhaps Madtux might help.
That was from 3mins of Googling - you get my drift. Linux on PS3 is almost as old as Linux on PS2 (one with HDD). Anyone remember Linux on xbox?
I am not sure who or what I should be insulting here - the selection of this story or Popular Mechanics. Oh and 129$ from newegg for a BDROM drive is cheap enough for me (HTPC and all) - Give it a couple of months and you will get sub 100$ BDROM drives and as any serious gamer knows, it's not the console price that will get ya - it's the games as they come out but I digress. Back to watching Monty Python on Hulu...
If you follow the instructions at PM's website you should be aware that the command to return to the PS3's native OS is not as the article has it. The correct command is "boot-game-os". Several folks made comments to that effect but for some reason PM is acting as if the error is cast in concrete and can't be corrected.
Secondly, the wireless adapter isn't supported yet so if you want Internet, you'll need to run a cable to your PS3 or plan on doing some compiling to get wireless support. For those of you who are old hands at Linux, this may be no big deal but for someone like myself who hasn't used Linux, it's an opportunity to learn a lot of new things. It reminds me a lot of decades ago when I first read K&R's C.
And there is only one PPE, although it is dual-threaded.
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.
--
make install -not war
What's "news" is that this isn't the release version of Linux on PS3 that you installed back then, and that now it actually works.
There is indeed now a X/MPlayer video driver that runs full 1080p HD right on the Cell CPU.
And I don't know why you think the Cell CPU "really isn't designed for general purpose computing". That Cell includes a 3.2GHz multithreaded PowerPC that runs all PPC distro Linux SW right out of the distro, as apt-get'able binaries. And there are drivers and apps that use the Cell's 200GFLOPS of onboard DSPs for real computing, like that driver to which I just linked. The Cell is being used by IBM as the CPU in its highest end workstations and blade servers, as well as some of the fastest supercomputers on the drawing board - all running Linux compatible with the one on the Cell.
Look, I understand that 2 years ago the PS3's initial Linux support was more of a novelty, when the PS3 itself had been rushed to market before even the HW was really ready. But the past 2 years has seen its Linux support pass the stage where it's just a "dancing poodle" to where it's more like a husky sleighdog or a border collie. And the reason is that interested people have helped upgrade its Linux support. Linux is open-source so that users can improve it. Which people have done. It still needs a lot of help, but mainly because its potential is so huge, with the onboard supercomputer and built-in WiFi/Bluetooth/Blu-Ray/HDMI/7.1-audio/Gb-ethernet, all for $500. And that chance for volunteers to continue to shape the platform is exciting news for a lot of people, many of whom are exactly the kinds of geeks who read Slashdot.
And I hear it plays games, too.
--
make install -not war
The Cell's SPUs are used as video accelerators by the X/MPlayer video driver, while Linux and other apps run on the Cell's 3.2GHz PPC core without slowing for the video.
The WiFi, Bluetooth and all the other snappy onboard HW is also now running under Ubunuto.
You are judging the platform on its initial Linux support from 2 years ago, when the machine was released (rushed to market). Since then, the platform has come of age. It still needs testing and packaging help to be "grandma ready", but that's why geeks like Slashdotters should get into it now: Linux is a community effort, and the community should try it now that it's at critical mass.
And, as a Cell dev kit, it's a $500 platform that can develop Linux apps that can run on $million supercomputers. And it plays games.
--
make install -not war
There is an X/MPlayer video driver that runs 2D on the Cell's SPUs, while the Cell's PPC core runs Linux and regular Linux apps. It needs some more work, and 3D functions are yet to be added to the Cell SW. But although the PS3 GPU is indeed a 1.8TFLOPS nVidia chip, I'd say that the 204GFLOPS Cell is "where all the power is" now, and several times as fast as your PC.
BTW, the PS3 runs PS1 games under the Sony GameOS in SW emulation at full (or greater) speed, without using Linux.
--
make install -not war
Yes, the X/MPlayer video driver works now, playing 1080p HD video right out of the builtin HDMI port.
You might find yourself leaving your PC on just to play a game once in a while.
--
make install -not war
According to this the Playstation 3 has 1 3.2Ghz power pc core that manages 8 of the vector processors. Apparently only 7 of the vector processors are used, the 8th is redundant in case one fails?
Free Playstation 3, XBox 360 and Nintendo Wii
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
I think it's like how Hyperthreading CPUs are counted as two processors if I'm not mistaken. There is one core, but it's seen by the OS as a dual core. Again, I could be totally wrong on this as I haven't had Linux installed on my PS3 in over a year.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I've answered this before, but I'll do it again - I regularly have lunch with a tools programmer at Sony, and to dispel any rumours, Sony aren't against providing an opengl implementation to linux. I can't say too much, but there is work going on on this, but with no urgency and there are technical hurdles. Firstly, the PS3 doesn't come with opengl - the 3D api is called RSX. They won't be releasing this technology, and it wouldn't allow immediate compilation of 3D linux games anyway. An opengl implementation has to be implemented from the ground up, and in a way that protects the bios and copy protection layer from hacking. It might sell one or two more ps3s, but it won't sell any ps3 games, which is where sony make their profit.
In other words, someone is doing it, more as a hobby project, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
In some respects, it seems exactly like installing Linux from floppies.
In the olden days, you swapped the boot and root floppies; here you swap the hard drives, which indeed is somewhat complicated, as in "I wouldn't trust my grandmother to do it right" (not grandfather, though!).
As for the rest... OK, I am one of the few people in the universe who actually read documentation, but nevertheless... a page-long manual, illustrations included, makes the procedure somewhat complicated?
You do not need to swap hard drives. All you need to do is format/partition it using the game-os menu.Indeed, Linux has come a long way if not being able to simply pop a CD and install on anything, incuding a toaster, makes the install procedure "somewhat complicated".
Just pop in the linux cd, press install other os and follow the instructions on the screen.
You will however lose all your game saves, so be sure to take a backup.
I myself installed linux before i started playing games, so did not have to worry about backing up my hard drive.
I dont recommend linux on ps3 though, as it runs bog slow due to 256MB ram, no gpu access and linux not being optimized for the hardware.
A while back I setup an overlay for use on Gentoo / PS3 to try and get some of the more recent kernels / hardware working. I'm in the middle of looking to update it at the moment with 2.6.25, and to try and get some of the stuff I've posted in the forum updated onto a web-site. It looks as if the git repo tree now has tags for 2.6.25 which should make things a lot easier.
Bluetooth is possible, but just needs a couple of patches I think for HID support, this might now already be included in the later releases of bluez-utils (I need to check)
For the RSX / Graphics support, this appears to be a bit crappy at the moment, but it is fun to watch F-Zero / Mario Kart on a HD TV using while using the wireless controller, and there is the option to use a VGA cable for non HDMI monitors
To use the SPU's I think 64bit is required, with gcc 4.3
One of the main uses I could see would be the processor for rendering (e.g. yafray) if it had the support. Although at the moment there's not much that's written to take full advantage of the SPU's potential power, given that it operates under a different architecture than the ppc core (although it does heat the room quite nicely)
It's an in-order design, but it does have two threads and a full VMX128 vector processing unit.
This means it's probably about as powerful as a 3.2GHz Intel Atom CPU (maybe a bit stronger because it doesn't have that low-power design requirement) - therefore about as powerful as a 2 GHz Intel Dothan (+/- 25% depending on task and effectiveness of the threading capability), with stronger SIMD and 6 extra very powerful but limited co-processors.
You only need to strip the container and put it in a container format the PS3 supports, you shouldn't need to transcode the h.264 at all.
not informative at all. Wireless most certainly does work out of the box. As does bluetooth for both controllers and keyboards. On top of that there's been a bunch of work to port CPU intensive things (like the framebuffer and mplayer/mencoder) to the SPU's. They're in various states, but mplayer at least is able to play most video files of any size seamlessly because it dumps it on the SPU's. In the future, I'd suggest not attempting to write posts being informative on technology when your knowledge of the technology is clearly 18 months to 2 years old.
Yes, because native ps3 sucks at playing divx/xvid. 100% of my h264 files don't play, and about 90% of my xvid files don't play on PS3's native player. The files almost have to be made with the ps3 in mind to play, it's really annoying.
The SPU's can do integer math very fast, the problem is all software has to have SPU optimization (which is not trivial) written into it in order to utilize the SPU's. The odds of that happening to something like GCC is nonexistent...who cares enough to do that...nobody. But programs that are actually considered necessities to run fast (mplayer/mencoder, X11 driver) have already been ported and will run blazingly fast using the SPU's.
Fixed that for you.
Surely this is a silicon yield trick. By requiring only 7 SPE's it means that chips with broken SPEs can be used in PS3s while the rarer 8 SPE version can be used in IBM Blades?
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/04/1916242
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/06/11/17/1327239.shtml
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/07/211214
I am billdar, and I approve this message.