PlayStation 3 HDD to Ship With Linux

timtwobuck writes "Gamespot.com is reporting that Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, has disclosed in an interview that PlayStation 3 will natively run Linux. In fact, it will come bundled with it, if you purchase the HDD peripheral." From the article: "But while Linux would require a hard drive to run on, Kutaragi told Impress PC Watch, 'We're not going to equip [the PS3 with] a HDD by default, because no matter how much [capacity] we put in it, it won't be enough.' It was unclear whether he was referring to the previously known fact that the PS3 would not have an internal hard drive or whether he was indicating that the device would not come with the external 2.5-inch detachable HDD outlined in the specs revealed at E3."

Re:Not suprising.

[alexandreracine]

The money is made with the hardware (in PS3 case), not directly with the software...

And unless they buy a copy from india (1$), I don't think they will change the price of the PS3 just to include Windows.

Re:Linux bluetoooth support ?

[FauxPasIII]

Stable but wonky interface, in my experience. You have to manually poke it to get it to attach to a
new device, and at least on my belkin parts you have to manually switch crypto off and then back on.
Oh, and anybody in the world can listen in on your keypress events, but that's not a Linux thing,
that's an auto-selected 4 numeral PIN thing ;)

Re:Linux bluetoooth support ?

[dieman]

Very good, it works great with Ubuntu and Debian as long as you can deal with setting up some things by hand (ie: editing /etc/default/bluez-utils and some files in /etc/bluetooth/)

You'll also need to setup HIDD and after the drivers and bluez-util init script has been ran just run "hidd --connect ".

For bluetooth keyboards you'll need another keyboard around to type a pin in. then type the pin into your new bluetooth keyboard to pair it.

It takes me about 5 minutes at worst these days to get a new bluetooth install going. Be sure to enable encryption and authentication in hcid.conf, too.

Re:Opening the door for game pirates?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the xbox is "so hackable" because they leave LPC points on the mobo for testing - it's easy to bypass the bios using these LPC pads and a ground on the d0 pad. It's more accurate to say "hackability is the reason linux runs on the xbox".

Re:Linux bluetoooth support ?

[blonde rser]

Check out http://www.bluez.org/ [bluez.org]. I use an apple bluetooth keyboard with my debian system without any kernel patches and it runs overall pretty well (although there are a few glitches). By the time the PS3 comes out I have confidence that it will be completely smooth.

Re:Spelling please?: Kutaragi

[Heian-794]

The fun-packed grammar and spelling nazi show can be followed by the Useless Japanese Trivia show:

Ken Kutaragi -- in Japanese, v'½--Ç-Ø OE', is one of those lucky fellows with a four-character surname. You can go for years among Japanese people and never meet such a person; it's like having a European-language surname that starts with "X". There are even web sites devoted to listing up all the 4+ character surnames.

And that was Useless Japanese Name Trivia for today!

Re:Open source?

[listen]

But it is possible QEMU could be ported, and Transitive almost certainly would be willing to work with sony on this.... their stuff has been used for PS2 games before along with Cedega.
So wine could work using either of these options.

Re:Won't be enough?

[hollismb]

Wrong. You're basing that off really old rumors that turned out not to be true. Microsoft is shipping all XBOX 360s with a 20 Gig HD, included in the box. It's removable to be upgradable and portable so you can take your data/saves/music with you to use on other XBOX 360s though.

Re:Open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tough to crack. PS2 Linux ran inside a castrated virualized environment, very similar to Bochs. That's why no companies wrote PS2 games for PS2 linux. Because you couldn't really use a PS2 in PS2 linux. It was a red herring to keep people from doing the same thing they did to XBox from having a strong and legal motivation to reverse engineer.

Re:Becoming hyped and ruining gaming simultaneousl

[Anonymous Coward]

If Nintendo dies out, it'll becuase they fucked up. I'm tired of all the nintendo-heads out there.
There's nothing magical about them.. Ya, you might think they make more innovative games, but there are good games for the playstation and the xbox as well.
Even if there are a million bad games for the PS2 and only 100 really good ones, that's still better than having 10 good games and 100 bad games, or whatever the gamecube's games library looks like...

Kids don't only want hookers, blood, and gore in the games. Everyone wants replayability and fun goddamnit, and innovation is overrated.
How would the competition drive gaming to a low point? Is the games industry unique in the way that competition works?

And yes, you do sound like a troll.

Re:Not suprising.

[Spy Hunter]

That's because nobody else had the Linux kit. Everybody who has a PS3 hard drive will have Linux. Of course, the Linux games won't hold a candle to the official licensed PS3 games. But you'll be able to play tons of silly little arcade games, solitaire, Frozen Bubble, things like that. At the very least, all the games you can play on Linux now. The concept of mainstream users playing a non-officially-licensed game on a PS3 is quite novel.

Re:Not suprising.

[Rallion]

Whoa, hold up. You expect them to profit on the hardware? I don't think so.

Re:Opening the door for game pirates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this going to make it easier for people looking to copy games?

On the ps2, linux had no access to the dvd drive. No reason to believe they'd start now, though I suppose they could use the same game-cd-detector they use for making sure that you don't play copied games in reverse, to make sure linux can't read a game cd. Of course, if someone figured out how to get a ps3 game to boot from linux, they could then play copied ps3 games in linux since they wouldn't trip the game-cd-detector...

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 9 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Re:OK, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Professors don't send out documents in nerdy text formats.

I dunno, here at Berkeley we use LaTeX for a lot of CS assignments...

Re:Not listening to anything re HDD

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess you've never played online?

1 port for the USB keyboard.
1 port for the USB headset.

Re:PS2 Linux

[bebing]

I disagree, 100 bucks for 40GB HDD, keyboard, mouse, network adaptor, custom linux distro, official pdfs on the internals of the ps2 including a manual for each chip seems like a good deal to me at that time(2+ years ago?). Concerning suitable displays, you could install out of the box on a ntsc, pal, or SOG monitor, through a controller cheat code, though this info was delayed, people were doing 'blind installs' on tvs. I understand that the latest homebrew development platform sps2 gets pretty close to the hardware. And I also use ps2linux to this day as a desktop.