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Developing On the PS3 Under Fedora

Posted by Soulskill on from the ignore-the-toy-and-play-with-the-box dept.

An anonymous reader writes to point out the first in a series of articles from a while back about using the Playstation 3 as a development environment under Fedora. Here are the second and third parts of the series. Quoting: "Early on, it was a bit of a challenge to get Linux natively installed on the PS3. Time has passed, and a great deal has changed. Fedora 7 installs on the PS3 out of the box, with the most challenging installation steps eliminated. This article introduces the basic configuration knobs and widgets specific to the PS3 running Linux, shows you how to use them effectively, and suggests the kind of trickery that gets improved performance."

7 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. How oddly timely by dreamchaser · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I just finally bought a PS3 about a week ago and was getting ready to install Linux on it. I wish we could access the GPU but I understand why Sony doesn't want that. I think I found my project for the weekend.

    1. Re:How oddly timely by CronoCloud · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Firefox 3 under Linux on the PS3 is a better web browser than Netfront under GameOS.

    2. Re:How oddly timely by belgian_embedded_ · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I want to play around with some Cell coding;

      A few months ago, i was part of a project writing a demo app for PS3... We wrote some cell-code to scale webcam images. The app is written in C, the project website can be found here: http://cellproject.kjeldelaey.be/documentatie/html/annotated.html The site is in dutch, but the code is documented in english.

    3. Re:How oddly timely by CronoCloud · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have my PS3 on a computer desk with a 19inch HD LCD, so it's more like a regular PC desktop setup, keyboard tray, printer and everything.

  2. big blue trying to hack their own cpu :) by pimpimpim · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Nice to find a solution to find a cheap hack to use the Cell on an IBM website. Sometimes you really wonder if they have seen the light :)

    I wonder if these machines would make an excellent slim desktop pc to compete with eee desktop and others. But I guess reselling the ps3 with linux preinstalled will be fought by Sony.

    --
    molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
  3. Yellow Dog Linux for the PS3 by synthespian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sony has payed the Yellow Dog Linux guys to port Linux to the PS3, so it's probably more optimized for it than Fedora (even though it's based on Fedora), for instance, by using the Enlightenment window manager.

    http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/ydl/

    --
    Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
  4. Re:An interesting video but ... by hairyfeet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Thanks for the info everyone,it makes a lot more sense now. Question: has anybody hacked the graphics core so you can run code on it yet? It seems to me if you were going to link a bunch of PS3s together having all those graphics cores sitting idle when they could be processing vectors seems like a waste. According to the Wiki the GPU gets 1.8 TFLOPs which,when combined with the cell would make for some truly scary number crunching. So anybody have any luck with it? I know that Sony is scared of piracy,but surely they could release a binary blob that simply lets you run number crunching,maybe an Nvidia binary that only allows certain apps to be run through the GPU. I also see on the Wiki that it share a lot in common with the Nvidia 7800. Maybe that could be the way in? But as always this is my 02c based on curiosity,YMMV

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    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.