Yeah, with enough kernel hacking and patience. Gray (one of xRhino's Linux miniturization experts) got a very impressive system crammed into 2mb. You can use the cramfs feature in the 2.2.21-pre1-xr7 xRhino Linux Kernel to append the filesystem to the end of the kernel image, you end up with a 4MB kernel/rootfs image, which you then put on the memory card.
You can then point the DVD-based bootloader to the image on memory card and boot without the need of a HDD unit, which is pretty useless but fun to do anyway.
You can download the CRAMFS enabled kernel from the xRhino Linux Kernel project located at:
If memory serves, which it usually doesn't with me, we used blackbox to provide most of the basic linux commands. The system had samba, full networking support, a web server and some other neat stuff.
As a compute cluster the PS2's raw number crunching power is pretty impressive... but its relatively high price and lack of a high-speed network interconnect kills it as a good clustering solution.
What it is good at though is teaching programmers how to write MIPS assembler, work with relatively small memory requirements, do advanced embedded development, program vector processing units, program sound processing units, perform DMA by hand, and mess with incredibly low-level graphics programming. Its a great embedded development training platform...
and then you can download the gcc_2.95.2-16.tar.gz file and there ya go, full source code. This applies to any package available on BlackRhino Linux. You might want to check out how to build Debian packages first in the Debian Package Maintainers Guide.
This thread as well as the couple surrounding it make great examples of why one would want to use the PlayStation 2 Linux kit. As stated throughout the comments, the PlayStation 2 Linux kit is not for everybody... perhaps I can shed some light on why a developer in the PS2 industry would want to use one.
I'm one of the guys that put the BlackRhino Linux distribution together and also, one of the founders of xRhino.
We started the company for the sole purpose of bringing Linux to the PlayStation 2, this was far before we even knew of Sony's PS2 Linux efforts. How great would it be, we thought, for everybody to have access to this incredibly advanced piece of hardware through Linux. As we now know, Sony was thinking the exact same thing.
A typical PlayStation 2 developer sits at a standard PC, edits his/her PS2 code, compiles it on the PC and then uploads it to a big honkin' machine called a DTL-10000. These big honkin' machines aren't cheap... infact, you could buy a good used car for the price of one of these boxes. Couple that with you have a team of 15 developers and that is a huge amount of up-front investment for a start-up game company... and thats just for the hardware.
While developing our PS2 commercial application, we were able to use much cheaper PS2 debug units to write, compile and test our code on. Instead of a big honkin' machine that cost the same as a good used car, we spent 1/10th of that on an equally powerful development machine for each developer.
Coding on the PS2 Linux kit allows a PS2 developer to test out ideas and use pre-built Linux libraries to speed development along without tying up expensive development hardware.
So, the PS2 Linux kit lets a developer save time during product creation by using cheaper hardware to accomplish the same code, compile, run, debug cycle.
It also helps the developer in another way, which was our main point with BlackRhino Linux and our PlayStation 2 product. Our commercial product is called RockSteady and it is a MP3 and Internet Radio player for the PlayStation 2. It would play MP3s off of any Samba share on your network, and it would also stream Internet Radio from the web and play it on your home stereo system.
While developing the product under BlackRhino Linux, we didn't have to worry about writing a networking stack from scratch, or a MP3 decoder, or a scripting engine, or an XML parser, or anything a typical Linux programmer takes for granted. Since we were running Linux, we could use all the development tools available under the open-source sun.
Linux has one of the most solid networking stacks out there, libmad was our MP3 decoder, Python our scripting language, libxml2 was our xml parser and SDL was used for graphic display. It wasn't nearly as fast as coding natively, but we were able to put a complete application together using about 1/5th of the resources it would have taken to do it the traditional way... and that is the true power of using Linux to do PS2 development, it saves you precious development resources (time and money).
I thank those of you that have Linux kits for explaining why somebody would want to use one... again, its not for everyone... but it sure is a great little development box.
You can actually use a TV as the display... its a simple change in one of the boot scripts.
Unfortunately, Sony decided that it would confuse consumers too much to allow the PS2 Linux kit to be compatible with games... there are also a number of technical reasons this wasn't done. Sorry, you can only use the PS2 Linux kit to run Linux. The kit is provided mostly so hobbyist game programmers can get some real experience programming games on real game hardware.
Its also gives some people a kick to run a web server off of their PlayStation 2.
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You can then point the DVD-based bootloader to the image on memory card and boot without the need of a HDD unit, which is pretty useless but fun to do anyway.
You can download the CRAMFS enabled kernel from the xRhino Linux Kernel project located at:
https://playstation2-linux.com/projects/xrhino-ker nel/
If memory serves, which it usually doesn't with me, we used blackbox to provide most of the basic linux commands. The system had samba, full networking support, a web server and some other neat stuff.
As a compute cluster the PS2's raw number crunching power is pretty impressive... but its relatively high price and lack of a high-speed network interconnect kills it as a good clustering solution.
What it is good at though is teaching programmers how to write MIPS assembler, work with relatively small memory requirements, do advanced embedded development, program vector processing units, program sound processing units, perform DMA by hand, and mess with incredibly low-level graphics programming. Its a great embedded development training platform...
-- manu
For example, if you wanted the source code for the entire compiler, you just go into the BlackRhino Debian-esque repository like so:
http://blackrhino.openlists.com/pool/main/g/gcc-2. 95/
and then you can download the gcc_2.95.2-16.tar.gz file and there ya go, full source code. This applies to any package available on BlackRhino Linux. You might want to check out how to build Debian packages first in the Debian Package Maintainers Guide.
-- manu
I'm one of the guys that put the BlackRhino Linux distribution together and also, one of the founders of xRhino.
We started the company for the sole purpose of bringing Linux to the PlayStation 2, this was far before we even knew of Sony's PS2 Linux efforts. How great would it be, we thought, for everybody to have access to this incredibly advanced piece of hardware through Linux. As we now know, Sony was thinking the exact same thing.
A typical PlayStation 2 developer sits at a standard PC, edits his/her PS2 code, compiles it on the PC and then uploads it to a big honkin' machine called a DTL-10000. These big honkin' machines aren't cheap... infact, you could buy a good used car for the price of one of these boxes. Couple that with you have a team of 15 developers and that is a huge amount of up-front investment for a start-up game company... and thats just for the hardware.
While developing our PS2 commercial application, we were able to use much cheaper PS2 debug units to write, compile and test our code on. Instead of a big honkin' machine that cost the same as a good used car, we spent 1/10th of that on an equally powerful development machine for each developer.
Coding on the PS2 Linux kit allows a PS2 developer to test out ideas and use pre-built Linux libraries to speed development along without tying up expensive development hardware.
So, the PS2 Linux kit lets a developer save time during product creation by using cheaper hardware to accomplish the same code, compile, run, debug cycle.
It also helps the developer in another way, which was our main point with BlackRhino Linux and our PlayStation 2 product. Our commercial product is called RockSteady and it is a MP3 and Internet Radio player for the PlayStation 2. It would play MP3s off of any Samba share on your network, and it would also stream Internet Radio from the web and play it on your home stereo system.
While developing the product under BlackRhino Linux, we didn't have to worry about writing a networking stack from scratch, or a MP3 decoder, or a scripting engine, or an XML parser, or anything a typical Linux programmer takes for granted. Since we were running Linux, we could use all the development tools available under the open-source sun.
Linux has one of the most solid networking stacks out there, libmad was our MP3 decoder, Python our scripting language, libxml2 was our xml parser and SDL was used for graphic display. It wasn't nearly as fast as coding natively, but we were able to put a complete application together using about 1/5th of the resources it would have taken to do it the traditional way... and that is the true power of using Linux to do PS2 development, it saves you precious development resources (time and money).
I thank those of you that have Linux kits for explaining why somebody would want to use one... again, its not for everyone... but it sure is a great little development box.
-- manu
You can buy the PS2 Linux kit online at:
http://www.us.playstation.com/purchase/hardware/
Buy PS2 Linux Kit
You can actually use a TV as the display... its a simple change in one of the boot scripts.
Unfortunately, Sony decided that it would confuse consumers too much to allow the PS2 Linux kit to be compatible with games... there are also a number of technical reasons this wasn't done. Sorry, you can only use the PS2 Linux kit to run Linux. The kit is provided mostly so hobbyist game programmers can get some real experience programming games on real game hardware.
Its also gives some people a kick to run a web server off of their PlayStation 2.
-- manu