Feature Articles

Linux on the PS3: First Encounters

By Vincent Chang - 30 Nov 2006

First Impressions

First Impressions

We weren't too sure what to expect from Fedora Core on the PS3 but after the initial glee at getting the GUI up and running had died down, we hit the first stumbling block. There was no proper display driver for the NVIDIA based RSX graphics processor. Therefore, the screen resolution was restricted to a rather pathetic 576 x 384, a massive downgrade from the 1080p resolution of the PS3's own native system. Without drivers and hence no way of resizing the resolution, the applications will still run but you may end up viewing a quarter or less of the actual window, making most applications rather useless.

Once you get the boot loader installed, it will run instead of the PS3's own operating system. From here, you can install Fedora Core or start Fedora Core if you already have it installed.

The loading screen for Fedora Core 5.

The Gnome desktop in its full Fedora Core glory.

The good news is that the networking seems to work out of the box. We enabled DHCP during the network setup and after we fired up the default Mozilla Firefox browser, we were able to surf the Internet. The only problem of course was that the screen resolution, which meant that surfing was a torturous affair and not recommended until the display issue is settled.

Load times for applications were also much longer than expected. With hindsight, we should have predicted that before we installed Fedora Core because the Gnome desktop environment is not exactly meant for weak machines due to its eye candy quotient. The PS3 may have an advanced processor but it only has 256MB of DRAM for the system and a separate 256MB frame buffer. With no hardware acceleration enabled, the PS3 was probably laboring to render the desktop and opening applications was an added drag. For instance, OpenOffice 2.0 felt like it took an eternity to start up though it did improve noticeably after the first time due to caching. Other applications that should have fired up within seconds, like the included games, were also very slow in loading. All in all, it was quite frustrating doing almost anything.

You can see the various Sony drives on the PS3, like the ones for the Compact Flash and SD.

With no graphics driver, this is the default resolution. We didn't manage to change it.

We tried surfing Hardwarezone but as you can see, it's not practical with our resolution.

We also tried to play some media, like audio and video clips. The sound driver seems to be initialized properly and it worked. However, the MP3 file we tested did not play due to the lack of a decoder while the video player failed to find an appropriate codec to playback our video file. Again, some of these issues may be specific to Linux, like the lack of video codecs and should probably be solved with some downloads in time to come. Out of the box however, the multimedia aspect is definitely not ready for mainstream use yet, though that may not be directly related to the PS3.

It took a while to get Open Office started and the result of that wasn't too impressive either.

A sentiment expressed by a colleague. Nothing works practically when your resolution is stuck at a pathetic 576 x 384. Hopefully this would be rectified real soon.

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