Tag Archives: ppc

YDL and the Versatile Side of the PS3

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Although not yet available to the general public yet (<2weeks), Terra Soft has now released Yellow Dog Linux 6 to their YDL.net community.

One of the most important improvement in this release is the fact that the distribution is now built upon CentOS, with select Fedora 7 components, making it a much more robust enterprise solution. YDL6 has support for the PS3, Apple G4/G5 and IBM System p.

Don’t know why you would want to run Linux on your PS3? Just check Terra Soft’s projects/clients showcase to get an idea of how powerful the Cell-based console truly is. From driving a car to solving celestial mysteries, this sure is one versatile little black box.

Pre-Order a PS3 with Linux Installed

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TerraSoft is now taking pre-orders for Sony PlayStation 3 with Yellow Dog Linux 5 pre-installed. YDL5 is based on Fedora Core 5.

If you already have the new console, you can also just order the new YDL5 distro on DVD, or download it via TerraSoft’s YDL.net Enhanced. Both options have support options.

You can also wait a few more days and download it during the week of December 25, or take the more experimental road, and do it the other way.

Help Requesting Flash for Linux on PowerPC

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Kai Staats is asking for the community’s support in requesting for Adobe to port Flash 9 for Linux to the Power architecture (YDL, really). He also appropriately suggests for people to submit the requests with consistent[-ish] data, so the numbers work in the movement’s favour.

Soon to be fully opened sourced, Sun’s Java is sure to quickly become available for this platform, therefore making the Flash player and browser plugin one of the next must-have components remaining to be ported. We will need Adobe to provide us with this port though, since the Flash Player source is not Free or available.

I haven’t yet, but in the meantime, one could also try to use Gnash, a GNU Flash movie player.

Update: I tried Gnash 0.7.2 (in FC6 Extras) on my iBook G3 tonight. It’s promising, but most definitely is a work in progress to say the least (admittedly so: alpha 2). Most simple animations work fine enough, but more advance Flash movies are still out of reach. It also does not seem to support the now iconic Flash Video format (flv), now made ubiquitous on the Web through such high profile sites as YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, and countless others.

Having a bad tech weekend…

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I started on a quest to install Linux PPC on my older iBook G3 yesterday. I wanted to try and breathe some productivity back into it, as Apple has been phasing out G3 support over the last few years. But I’m not having too much luck so far…

I first installed Fedora Core 6 PPC, which all seemed fine until I tried to put the laptop to sleep. The whole thing crashed on wake up, and corrupted GNOME so bad, for all users, that I was unable to recover from it, even after rebooting…

Fedora Core 6 error when waking the G3 iBook from sleep
Not being in the mood to troubleshoot the thing, I decided to give a try to Ubuntu Desktop 6.10 PPC instead. Again, the install went fine, and sleep was working this time, but then I was quickly remembered why I stuck to a server environment when running Linux PPC in the past: no flash, no easy way to play video (vlc, mplayer, xine, ffmpeg, etc all crashed), no java, no wpa wireless security protocol setup by default, etc.

Aaaaaaaargh! I’ve had enough of that for one weekend… And it’s not for lack of trying, as I’ve probably spent more than 12 hours giving it all a fair try. But not being the type to just give up completely, I’m getting the FC6 PPC DVD at work as we speak, and I’ll try again next week. Knowing Linux, there are probably solutions to most of my problems.

We shall see.

Sony OtherOS Installer for Sony PlayStation 3 Released

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Last saturday, I posted about Terra Soft releasing Yellow Dog Linux 5 for the PS3 on November 27th. And earlier this week, the Fedora developers tried to one-up them by releasing an add-on disc for FC5 PPC (which YDL is based on) to install the original distribution on one’s shiny new console.

Today, the very much anticipated Sony OtherOS Installer was also made available for download, unleashing the final key to enabling anyone to easily turn the powerful game console into a full blown computer.

It is advised to use the FC5 PPC DVD, rather than CD set, to proceed with this installation:

For more details, the Quick Journal team has a couple of nice articles on how to boot and install GNU/Linux on the PlayStation 3.

I would still imagine, though, that Terra Soft will probably remain the leader in Linux for the Power Architecture, all the more in the enterprise market, given the type of resources they have to support their distribution: dedicated team, first Cell-based supercomputer, IBM and Sony backing, etc.

But for many, you can’t be early and free! :)

Update: Someone has now posted a video of Fedora Core 5 running on a PS3 on YoutTube.