The PS3 Linux distro we've all been waiting for

[Rolf N]

It's Ubuntu 7.04, arguably the best current Linux distribution for end-users (well 'cept for digi, Linux itself grew a consciousness just to be able to hate him ).

I saw it over at NeoGAF, and am downloading the image as I'm writing this. There's a torrent, a traditional http download and a guide that covers installation and first steps.

Due to a major SNAFU the linked iso image is not functional as an installation CD!
You must use an "Alternate" install CD.

There doesn't appear to be a version including my favourite desktop environment yet, but I'll just try to add that once the base system is up and running. And yes, I'll gladly and without hesitation wipe out my YDL installation.

 

[Todd33]

Thanks for the heads up. Will the install see the YD and do the wiping for me or do I have to start from scratch and reformat? I still need wi-fi to work too

 

[Nesh]

Can this be a sticky?

Such threads should be a sticky for all future owners that might want to install Linux.
I might get a PS3 in the future and if that happens I d be interested to install Linux on it and I would like to be able to find such threads easilly

 

[StefanS]

Can this be a sticky?

Such threads should be a sticky for all future owners that might want to install Linux.
I might get a PS3 in the future and if that happens I d be interested to install Linux on it and I would like to be able to find such threads easilly

As a rule of thumb we limit ourselves to 3 stickies maximum, so unless the considerable interest, this one won't get the sticky attribute.

BTW, remember you read it here first Weekly Gaming News Roundup

 

[Rolf N]

Thanks for the heads up. Will the install see the YD and do the wiping for me or do I have to start from scratch and reformat? I still need wi-fi to work too

There's a backup utility integrated into the XMB. You can save your stuff to any storage medium the PS3 can handle, though external USB harddrive enclosures obviously work best if you've been hoarding lots of stuff.
The backup image will not be 60GB large regardless of what you have, it's compressed and only as large as it needs to be. So deleting those old trailers will help.

Use that, repartition/format your hard drive in system settings, and then use the same backup utility to restore your files. Your account information isn't affected by any of this. I figure it's stored in on-board Flash memory.

The Ubuntu install process is simpler than YDL as it already includes that otheros.bld file, which the YDL installation guide made you download from another place and put on a thumb drive. Not required for Ubuntu.
No wi-fi support yet AFAICT.

Sorry Stefan
Not saying "You have a front page?!" but you know, to increase visibility, you might want to place article announcement threads into the corresponding forum sections. I think if Arun can do it for GPU tech articles in the GPU tech section, and after seeing that it works so well, there's no harm in announcing articles that would interest the console crowd in the console section of the forum

 

[SPM]

Ububtu 7.04 is great for the PC. The biggest thing is that if you have an AM2 or Opteron, or Intel VT capable CPU and bios, you don't need to dual boot Windows XP/2000/98 - you can just run it as a virtual machine, and it is dead easy to do it with KVM.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM?highlight=(kvm)

However I think for the PS3, a PS3 specific distro is better. YD supports Cell development, will presumably support Cell accelerated Mesa 3D acceleration, and a whole lot of other PS3 specific issues.

 

[betan]

Can this be a sticky?

Such threads should be a sticky for all future owners that might want to install Linux.
I might get a PS3 in the future and if that happens I d be interested to install Linux on it and I would like to be able to find such threads easilly

It would be really nice to have a central PS3 Linux discussion thread but I don't really see why it should be Ubuntu only. Beyond 3D should have more techies than NeoGAF after all.

However I think for the PS3, a PS3 specific distro is better. YD supports Cell development, will presumably support Cell accelerated Mesa 3D acceleration, and a whole lot of other PS3 specific issues.

While Yellow Dog is the first and probably most tweaked PS3 distro, it is not PS3 specific and Ubuntu (or any other distro) can and will include many SPU related stuff sooner than later.
SPU optimized Mesa3d will supposedly be open anyway.
Currently as far as I know Yellow Dog's main advantage is including Cell related dev libs but I am willing to bet Ubuntu and Debian will be better Cell development distros than Yellow Dog very very soon. Also some of us actually care about free software.

 

[Rolf N]

Ububtu 7.04 is great for the PC. The biggest thing is that if you have an AM2 or Opteron, or Intel VT capable CPU and bios, you don't need to dual boot Windows XP/2000/98 - you can just run it as a virtual machine, and it is dead easy to do it with KVM.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM?highlight=(kvm)

However I think for the PS3, a PS3 specific distro is better. YD supports Cell development, will presumably support Cell accelerated Mesa 3D acceleration, and a whole lot of other PS3 specific issues.

I have yet to see how it turns out on the PS3, but I can get a nice Ubuntu environment up and running on an IA32 PC and use just a hair under 100MB, including four somewhat redundant instances of Apache2 and the FaH Client. That's "use" as in "use", i.e. counting all buffers and caches, too (though it obviously grows larger when I start doing stuff). YDL wasn't so impressive in that regard. Will see how Ubuntu does on the PS3 after ripping out the printing and switching to xfce.

The best thing about Ubuntu is the Debian heritage and the apt system, which has grown beyond critical mass and is more or less "winning" the repository format race. Everybody and their mother maintains compatible repositories, and apt makes it trivial to go straight from source to install in the event that there's no binary that fits your platform.

And here's how you get the Cell SDK onto your favourite distro btw:
http://www.cellperformance.com/justin_lee/2006/08/cellbroadbandengine_sdk_11_on_ubuntu.html

 

[-tkf-]

One question, didn´t the Firmware 1.6 introduce a way to install Linux without having to Format the harddrive?

 

[Arwin]

One question, didn´t the Firmware 1.6 introduce a way to install Linux without having to Format the harddrive?

I think that's a misunderstanding. The 1.60 firmware does however make setting up using one of the boot-loader files (the otheros.self I think) redundant. Now you only need the other one that is provided for each distribution, and if the Ubuntu distro we are talking about also includes that already, that means you may not have to fiddle about with any USB sticks anymore. Or do you still have to copy out the loader from the Ubuntu distro and copy that back to USB first?

I'm interested, as Ubuntu has been warmly recommended to me before, and it looks like it may just be the right distro for the PS3.

 

[archangelmorph]

I think that's a misunderstanding. The 1.60 firmware does however make setting up using one of the boot-loader files (the otheros.self I think) redundant. Now you only need the other one that is provided for each distribution, and if the Ubuntu distro we are talking about also includes that already, that means you may not have to fiddle about with any USB sticks anymore. Or do you still have to copy out the loader from the Ubuntu distro and copy that back to USB first?

I'm interested, as Ubuntu has been warmly recommended to me before, and it looks like it may just be the right distro for the PS3.

Go to Ubuntu!

Embrace it!!

No bt seriously Ubuntu is such a great little OS and i'd reccomend it to anyone who's looking to do more on their PS3 than play resistance or motorstorm..

 

[-tkf-]

Go to Ubuntu!

Embrace it!!

No bt seriously Ubuntu is such a great little OS and i'd reccomend it to anyone who's looking to do more on their PS3 than play resistance or motorstorm..

Does the Linux partition have access to the USB drives i plugin? And can i chose the HD size i want the Unix Partition to use?
Yeah i´m looking for a media player as well

 

[archangelmorph]

Does the Linux partition have access to the USB drives i plugin? And can i chose the HD size i want the Unix Partition to use?
Yeah i´m looking for a media player as well

You shouldn't have a problem with USB drive access in Ubuntu...

As for HD size, I'm not sure but the good thing about Ubuntu is the support...

If you goto the homepage there are very useful forums and if you google for "Ubuntu How to" you can find a massive wealth of information on how to do various things..

 

[lefizz]

Hi just as a note i have been running feisty (7.04) on my ps3 for a couple of weeks.

The main issue people will come across is the fatc that the current build, infact the last 4 dont actually install on the PS3. They boot and you cn run them live but the install will fail at around 15%. The best option to get around this is to find a iso dated the 7th of April, the first Live cd works fine. Once this si installed you can update to to current version.

I have to say that even thought this is Ubuntu, on PS3 ther are a fair few issues, display res can only be changed via editing a text file. The sound doesnt work out of the box, though yet again editing a text file can get this working.

There is no wifi and also currenly my network conection whilst showing up as 100 baseT runs at 10baseT meanign streaming videos file etc from samba shares is imposible.

From my experience media playbacks wise ingore totem and instal VLC and mplayer. Both have issues though both run much better than totem, VLC is probably the best at the moment.

Hope this is of some help, for more info got to:-

http://psubuntu.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=1

All of the issue i have discussed are being talked about here and people are workign there way through the problems.

Phil

 

[Rainbow Man]

You shouldn't have a problem with USB drive access in Ubuntu...

Oh really? WOW! Thn I would really love to connect THIS up to my PS3 running Linux..

If that thing runs under Linux. I dunno if it does.

I had a look at the promo video on Drobo's website and it left me more confounded than when I began watching it! I don't understyand HOW it does it and I barely understand WHAT it does but it seems to work and it seems to work SMOOTHLY and the thing just looks plain amazing.

Expensive as hell thhough. It's like another whole PS3 god damn it hehe. And then you get no drives in it either. But one can at least dream right?
Peace.

 

[SPM]

Oh really? WOW! Thn I would really love to connect THIS up to my PS3 running Linux..

If that thing runs under Linux. I dunno if it does.

I had a look at the promo video on Drobo's website and it left me more confounded than when I began watching it! I don't understyand HOW it does it and I barely understand WHAT it does but it seems to work and it seems to work SMOOTHLY and the thing just looks plain amazing.

Expensive as hell thhough. It's like another whole PS3 god damn it hehe. And then you get no drives in it either. But one can at least dream right?
Peace.

Server stuff is Linux territory. The majority of NAS devices run embedded Linux, so it probably is an embedded Linux. The expense is probably due to the hotpluggable hard drives, which allow the RAID drives to be replaced and automatically reconstructed without interruption of service if a drive fails (or maybe it just has a lot of starage included in the price - say a terabyte). One terabyte for $700 is about right.

Actually, you can easily build a cheap and powerful RAID NAS server with a PC and some SATA drives with NCQ for performance (you don't need hardware RAID). All you need to do is download this -

http://www.openfiler.com/
http://www.openfiler.com/about/

 

[Rolf N]

If it behaves like generic USB mass storage to the outside world, i.e. there's no driver for it, for any current system, then Linux can handle it definitely. If it has some special stuff going on and there's a driver download for it, a bit of research would be in order.

So I've tried installing, and attempted to circumvent the problems by turning off most services before starting the installation, to free up some more memory. I'm sure that's the problem. Failed anyway.
What I should have tried is to keep the old partition layout. The system had been using YDL's old swap partition, and I figure it might have survived the install process if it weren't for my repartitioning. The swap space would have been available for the entire install process' length, but it ended as soon as the installer changed the partition layout.

What a stupid issue. Bah. Pre-release testing ftw. Downloading the alternate install CD now, and finding a nice place for yet another coaster.

 

[Rainbow Man]

You can't install from a big flash memcard? That's too bad if so..

And regards to the Drobo.. I don't ACTUALLY know if it's completely driverless or not. There's some funny windows in the background of the demo video on the official site (that pie chart thing) that makes me think maybe it isn't.

I would have checke dout the PDF about it but I haven't got acrobat installed anymore so I can't. Meh.
Peace.

 

[Rolf N]

You can't install from a big flash memcard? That's too bad if so..

Dunno about flash cards, but absolutely no luck for me with a USB stick.

Now. Been there, done that. Set me up a nice xfce desktop, threw out all the cruft (nautilus, totem, gaim, cups, vine, update notifier etc etc) and made the system start with a 720p display mode and four virtual desktops. My TV absolutely insists on overscan, which sucks, but what can ya do.
Result: 78MB used on the idle desktop after boot, 134MB left to do things with (the monitor tells me there's 212MB total, which doesn't quite add up, but the system should know better than me I guess). It works okay in any case. It has enough air to launch a few applications and dump a couple hundred words onto an unsuspecting forum.

The remaining issue, besides the overscan which I assume to be my TV's fault, is that it doesn't power off or reboot properly (have to hold the power button for ten seconds, until it beeps twice to force it off). The repository servers are getting hammered, so grabbing software is seriously unfun atm, too.

Bottom line: it can be done, but this is not what I expect an end-user/Linux neophyte/media-center prospector/homebrew consumer to be able to tolerate, let alone do. We're still not there yet. I'm sorry. We should all just go home.

 

[Carl B]

Result: 78MB used on the idle desktop after boot, 134MB left to do things with (the monitor tells me there's 212MB total, which doesn't quite add up, but the system should know better than me I guess). It works okay in any case. It has enough air to launch a few applications and dump a couple hundred words onto an unsuspecting forum.

Rolf just curious on the side, but what about those numbers doesn't add up?