I finally got around to install linux to my ps3. I dreamed of playing c64, sega megadrive and other emulator games with it, as playing them with computer without a pad and big screen tv just doesn’t cut it. And if you can do something with your console, you should!
The first thing I did was to install bigger hd. That was surprisingly easy as the manual had detailed instructions how to do it. The only tool you need is a philips screwdriver. The linux installation requires you to format your hd anyway, so it was a natural thing to do at that point. Ps3 provides a backup utility that you can use to backup up your games, music, pictures & everything to external USB-drive, so you don’t need to loose anything. The first strange thing was, that you can only partition the disk to either have 10GB to “other os” or 10GB to ps3. That’s it. I figured I was going to use my ps3 primarily for other things than linux, so I decided to allocate the smaller partition to linux. Why there is such a restriction, who knows?
I have used Debian & Ubuntu distributions in the past with my pc so my first choice was psubuntu. Version 7.10 (Gutsy), as newer versions don’t support ppc 
I followed installation instructions from the wiki and about an hour later it was running fine. Fine but slow. Really slow! I guess the low amount of RAM in ps3 was the main reason, or GNOME. Well, the slowness didn’t bother me that much. There were also problems with screen overscanning but googling with keywords: “1080p full screen overscan ps3videomode” helped out a lot. The cool thing was that the sixaxis controller worked out of the box. You just needed to press the ps button to get it registered (to test and calibrate it I used jcalibrator). Also, it needed to be connected with usb cable, as bluetooth connection required some additional tweaking. I also installed new kernel, for no particular reason, and it took a lot of unanticipated work.
Finally I was ready to play some games. I figured I’d start with dgen, the default megadrive emulator from ubuntu repositories. It installed fine and loaded my sonic the hedgehog rom. I was eager to heard the famous “Seeegaaa” sound… Duh, segmentation fault: core dumped. What the hell? After a lot of googling I found out that dgen isn’t working with ps3, nobody seems to know why. Damn. No problem, I’ll just try some another megadrive emu. Turns out most of them are not working or not found from ubuntu repositories. I even tried to compile some of them by hand but it just took way too much effort so I gave up (for some reason compiling with ps3 seems to be a lot harder than with i386). I moved on to c64, and tried out my favorite emu vice, also from the repo. Guess what? It didn’t work. At this point I had spent an entire day trying to play emulator games with my ps3 without luck. After a good night sleep I decided to ditch ubuntu, even though I love it in pc world. It worked great in every other way except for emulators. I’m sure they would’ve worked eventually, but it just seemed like too much work. I decided to try fedora based (yuck) Yellow Dog Linux, which I think is the “preferred” ps3 linux distro. Watching youtube videos and reading forums posts I expected it to run the desired emulators… But that’s another story. (to spare you, it did run them ok).
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