Ubuntu Linux on PS3
Note: kboot does not support reiserfs. I don’t know about petitboot.
I finally gave in and installed Ubuntu, exactly what a n00b would do and not a Linux pro with 5 years of experience with Gentoo/Debian/Arch. It couldn’t be helped, since the Debian PS3 installer CD is so old it only recognizes the sid distribution and failed. Ubuntu’s Debian, which I’m familiar with, and most of all, I don’t have to spend months compiling shit, which is quite slow on the Cell. Plus, it’s a game machine. All those seconds spent compiling could be used gaming, which broke the camel’s back once I figured that out.
The default install of GNOME really brought the PS3 to its knees. Right from the start, it was hitting swap… and that’s without having enabled /dev/ps3vram. In fact, it was positively unusable, so I installed XFCE4, but even that wasn’t good enough once I started Firefox. So fluxbox it is. It certainly looks good with urxvt, I’m sure you’ll agree.
MPD hasn’t come a long way. XMMS2, on the other hand, has made leaps and strides since I first saw it as a masked package in Gentoo Portage. Let’s see what it supports… .cue, .mpc (thank lord, finally something other than XMMS can play Musepack), .m4a/mp4 (I use that a lot)… and that’s all I guess. No TTA, APE, TAK, but it doesn’t matter that much. In any case, what’s obvious is that XMMS2 plays much more formats than MPD, which is good enough for me to overlook the fact that there’s very few clients for XMMS2. I’m quite happy to be moving on from MPD, which, frankly, didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
In conclusion, PS3 with Linux makes for a usable computer, provided you use more console apps and less graphical ones. It’s quite obvious it’s starved for RAM, and the CPU frankly isn’t what it was hyped to be, given that it’s an in-order CPU and that nothing uses the 6 SPEs. I also wish one could change the size of the partition allocated to Linux… to something bigger than 10GB. I have very low expectations from Sony, so I don’t expect any improvements to happen. Hell, firmware 3.00 did nothing for PS2 emulation as far as I could tell. They’ve obviously forgotten all about Linux, PS2 backwards compatibility (yes, there’s the patent, but I doubt that’s actually going to come out as a real solution), and the wonders of having 4 USB ports.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to setup SDLMAME.
