Setting Up Ubuntu On a PS3 For Emulation 81
Gizmodo is running a guide on how to install Ubuntu on a Playstation 3 and set it up to play vintage games through emulation. Quoting:
"It still kind of surprises me (in a good way) that Sony was, from the start, very OK with PS3 owners tinkering with Linux on their PS3s. A modified release of Yellow Dog Linux was available from the very beginning, and some very handy hard drive partitioning and dual-boot utilities are baked right into the PS3's XMB; Ubuntu gets installed on an entirely separate partition of your PS3's hard disk, so your default system doesn't get touched and switching between Ubuntu and the XMB is a piece of cake. There is a flipside to this coin, however. Since the PS3's Cell Processor is PowerPC based, you won't be able to use any Linux software that's compiled for x86, which is, unfortunately, most of it. However, Ubuntu has always had a PPC distro, and most of the basic stuff will work just fine. You can even load up a PPC-compiled Super Nintendo Emulator, SNES9X, and play some classic games pretty easily on your Sixaxis controller paired via Bluetooth."
Re:VM hacking? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:VM hacking? (Score:5, Informative)
I'll be to bed in a minute, SOMEBODY IS WRONG IN THE INTERNET!
First and foremost, just about anything will compile for PPC unless it uses assembly. C is "portable" for a reason. This fact completely invalidates your entire post for most programs, even emulators.
Further beating the dead horse, due to the hypervisor you can't access the 3D acceleration goodness of the PS3 while running anything but the "Playstation OS". This is to prevent such awesomeness as playing pirated games and romz on a device meant to play legally bought stuff, but doesn't matter with the good ol' games & systems we love and respect.
Hand in your geek card.
Re:VM hacking? (Score:4, Informative)
You've... never used a non-x86 Linux distro, have you? It's pretty much exactly the same as the equivalent x86 distro, except with a PowerPC/SPARC/MIPS/Alpha/ARM/etc. CPU instead. (And usually more sloppy QA, but that's another story.)
Very, very few programs require x86 assembly nowadays.
You've... never used a "fast" computer with a plain framebuffer, have you?
You know what, replying to you is a waste of time.
-:sigma.SB
Re:VM hacking? (Score:3, Informative)
You've obviously never used Gentoo Linux. This is where it shines the brightest.
That memory limit kicks the install times ass if you are installing live on the PS3.
There is, however, a pre-built stage4 tarball for the PS3 which contains all features and necessities for the PS3 (bluetooth stack, various drivers, etc.) you just install your wanted programs and tools afterward (like XFCE, or whatever windowmanager you prefer)
No need to stack a full x86 emulated system (Score:4, Informative)
Would it be too slow to load a slim PPC kernel and replace init with an optimized PPC-compiled qemu instance {...} and run a virtual x86 machine on that? It seems the downsize would be: two kernels and an image in non-volatile storage {...} That is, assuming qemu can do x86->PPC, else find an alternative (or write one, hey!)
All this is an absolute overkill.
If there are a couple of binary-only Linux applications that you have to run on PS3 and they are only compiled for x86, there's QEMU which has a special mode for running Unix-on-Unix, where it emulates an x86 CPU only for the x86 application and passes through all system calls to the actual native OS.
The DarWINE project is exactly doing that to run Windows applications on PPC Mac OS X boxes : the windows application and assorted Wine glue code goes inside QEMU, the call translated to Unix libraries go to the native system.
If you need to run Windows application, probably DarWine isn't that far from being runnable on PPC Linux.
And if you need to run old-school DOS games, DosBox has a built-in x86 emulator anyway.
The "emulate a full x86 Linux running inside a PPC Linux" is just a complete waste of resources.
And, as pointed by other /.ers, the PS3 hypervisor doesn't let Linux access the GPU anyway. So no Compiz, no hardware accelerated emulation of consoles with 3D chips (no N64, no PSX without PS3's own OS, no DreamCast, etc.)
Still there's a good access to the Cell's stream processing units, so Linux on PS3 has a good value for doing scientific calculation, and there's an attempt to accelerate Mesa 3D with the SPUs, in order to have some hardware-accelerated OpenGL, even without the GPU.
Re:VM hacking? (Score:3, Informative)
There's been a lot of work in this area, getting around the hypervisor has been done, and even a Xorg driver(PS3RSX Binary Driver) - but only for older firmwares than 2.10.
So, if you want to run older firmware - you can run compiz. Of course - this probably prohibits newer games.
Re:don't do this (Score:1, Informative)
Why would you want to run folding@home under PS3 linux, when there already is a native PS3 client that utilizes the SPUs?
The GPU clients beat the PS3 client, but it's still faster than the normal CPU-only PC clients by far.
Re:For most people, its vice versa (Score:3, Informative)
"If the cell is so much better, then, how come nothing on the PS3 demonstrates a massive superiority over a decent, new pc?
Yes, I'm sure they aren't utilizing it completely..."
Well, in the one sense you're right, if games shops don't learn to program properly for cell in pretty short order then the PC market will get ahead again. Actually that's pretty inevitable, because consoles are never quite cutting edge when released and then sink back from there.
OTOH, look up roadrunner and other mixed Opteron/Cell supercomputers. The cell is pretty shit-hot, if you know what you're doing with it, and it's not like they released one version and stuck with it. We have faster Cell chips than are in the PS3 now.
Re:don't do this (Score:3, Informative)
If you want more than 10GB of space, you can do it two ways. First, you can set up the PS3 so that the "Game OS" gets 10GB and Linux gets the rest - or you can hook up a USB2 drive.
You don't get access to the GPU, but you do get access to the GPU's memory, and they've come up with a way to use that VRAM as a fast swap device, bumping the effective memory close to 512MB. Still not spectacular, but certainly quite workable.
And if you can't build stuff from source, oh well. It's not that hard. (To those who would say they shouldn't have to build from source... sure, on a PC. Going off the beaten path to install Linux on a console, yeah, you should expect to have to roll up your sleeves a little. If you don't want to do that... then you're not a member of the intended audience.)
Re:VM hacking? (Score:3, Informative)
Very, very few programs require x86 assembly nowadays.
Unless you're talking about emulators, in which case it's very common.
Re:Architecture isn't a bid deal (Score:1, Informative)
How long ago was that - Just checking behaviour in KDE 4.2 now... Providing your hardware is detected properly Switching graphics modes is a simple point and click affair. dragging a file from web browser to an open folder pops up a dialogue box asking if want to copy move or create a link... Can't comment about xmms but I can certainly drag MP3s from Amarok and photos from digikam into kmail. Cut copy and paste of images could be a lot bet but for text I prefer it to everything else out there. Unix makes it really easy to copy and paste just using your mouse and being to access the last few items in your clipboard is a big advantage.
Re:Where's the S-Video out on a $400 PC? (Score:2, Informative)
at Office Depot
well there's your problem, right there