Adventures with Linux on PS3

Posted on April 16, 2009 by John Pencola

The stream has been dry lately folks! I figured it was due time to get back into posting some thoughts and experiences on here…

This past Christmas my wife surprised me with a PS3! <3 I’ve really enjoyed it and now that I’ve had a decent amount of hands-on time with each of the mainstream current-gen consoles (360 & Wii) I thought I would first share my experience. IMHO, overall it beats the fore-mentioned  consoles hands-down. It’s just rock-solid, got a great line-up of titles behind it, user-friendly, extensible, etc, etc. The Wii is nice, its fun and a new spin on gaming but in the end it just feels like a toy compared to the PS3. Xbox360 is decent ( read Halo series ) – but just feels like any other Microsoft product. Sony just nailed it on this one.

With that said, as the title of this post highlights I’ve been experimenting with installing Linux along-side the “game-os”. This isn’t going to be a post to detail the steps necessary for installing another OS on the PS3 ( there are plenty of those a few key-strokes away ) but just as an overview of the process I went through:

Preparation:

  1. Backed-up all data
  2. Formatted and partitioned the hard-disk. (40GB drive)
  3. Burned ISO and installed the boot-loader ( I recommend PetiteBoot – Walk-thru and download here )
  4. Burned ISO and installed Fedora Core 10 ( You want the PPC version and install the 64-bit )
  5. Set the default OS to the “Other OS” option and re-booted.

A few notes after re-boot:

  • I didn’t tinker with the boot configs… but I could not launch the GUI installer for Fedora. If this happens to you,  a quick Alt+F1 will flip you to the command line where you can run the text-based installer.
  • Booting the installer from the command line is done via:
    $ cd /var/tmp/mnt/sr0/ppc/ppc64
    $ kexec -f –append=”text” vmlinuz –initrd=ramdisk.image.gz
  • When the Fedora installer asks if you are sure you want to do a full install of Linux which will remove any existing data on partitions … have no fear and choose “Yes”.
  • I chose to move 1GB of space from the default ‘/ext3′ allotment to the ‘/swap’ space so my ‘/swap’ = 1512MB

Notes after install:

  • To launch Fedora from the console, run this command:
    $ startx
  • To switch back to the PS3′s GameOS, run this command from the console:
    $ ps3-boot-game-os
  • Fedora 10 runs very sluggish using this configuration.. I’m looking into ways to optimize performance from the 512MB of RAM that the PS3 has :(
    Ideas:
    - Configure Swappiness
             - http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?title=Main_Page#Swappiness 
             - http://digitizor.com/2009/01/31/fedora-speed-tweaks-make-fedora-faster/
    - Disabling unnecessary services ( SELinux, etc. )
    - Trying a new partition size with more swap space
    - Trying other (lightweight) Linux distros ( XFCE )
    - ?? Researching more…
This is a work in progress… check back for updates!

About John Pencola

Hello, my name is John Pencola. I can't get enough of exploring new technologies, discussing software principals, creating programs and having fun with interface design. I will share my experiences here and hope Liquid Language adds some useful information to the vast sea that is the web.
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  • http://www.consoleoverdrive.com Matt_cod

    I haven’t tried Fedora specifically, but I have spent some time with the PS3 while running Linux. I hate to recommend that you scratch the whole system and start over, but Yellow Dog Linux is a good distro that is specifically designed for the PPC architecture with the PS3 in mind – you may have a better experience. Its a graphical install and loads the GUI by default so there isn’t a need to know any console commands to get it running.

    The YDL developers have also been optimizing performance for the PS3 so it’s not particularly sluggish (though still noticeable) and seems to get better with every incremental release.

    Since Linux on the PS3 is such a niche category, resources and software can be a bit hard to find. If you’re interested in keeping with it, try these links:

    PS3 Bodega – I can’t say enough about how useful this site has been. there are tutorials for every issue that I’ve had and he has his own repo for important packages. http://blogs.ydl.net/billb

    The YDL forums – always a good place to start, and a lot of the members in the PS3 forum are informative and helpful. http://www.yellowdog-board.com/viewforum.php?f=19

    And I may as well plug myself since it’s almost obligatory. I just recently started blogging about my experiences of turning both my PS3 and Xbox 360 into HTPCs. For the PS3 this obviously involves Linux and I have a few articles about ways to streamline things with more to come in the future. http://www.consoleoverdrive.com

  • http://www.johnpencola.com John Pencola

    @Matt:
    Thanks for the tips! I have heard that YDL is supposedly optimized to run on the PS3 architecture, so I may give it a go. I don’t mind scrapping the whole thing and re-installing 20x as long as I can learn some things along the way and ultimately get an OS that will run relatively responsively. Down the road I am looking to use Linux to manage the “Media Server/PVR” necessities that I want to implement on the PS3. BTW, nice site!

  • http://www.consoleoverdrive.com Matt_cod

    The Media Server/center route is exactly what I would like to focus on, but there’s just so much work involved in getting the system running at a reasonable speed that I haven’t actually managed to start writing on the media center aspects yet. I did, however, sit down today and write about two of your concerns which I hadn’t made it to yet — services and swap space. Both articles are superficial at the moment but I’ll flesh them out as I have time. If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment – I’m playing with the site pretty regularly right now.

  • http://www.johnpencola.com John Pencola

    @Matt:
    Awesome, looking forward to reading some over the weekend. Performance seems to be the bottleneck here :( and ( from what Googling I’ve done ) unfortunately we can’t upgrade the PS3 RAM.

  • http://www.consoleoverdrive.com Matt_cod

    Performance is certainly the bottleneck. Linux on the PS3 is forced to run as a sort of virtual machine with the PS3 firmware limiting hardware access and performance. You certainly can’t upgrade the memory, which will always be a bottleneck, but you’re not locked into all of the hardware. For example, you can upgrade the HDD for some noticeable performance increases. As a matter of fact, now that I’m home and productive again, I took the time to write a quick article about just that since I’m sure that other people are in the same boat as both of us: http://consoleoverdrive.com/ps3/ps3-linux-optimization-hdd-upgrade/ . In short, for around $50 you can get some performance boosts in Linux that shouldn’t be ignored, as well as increase your PS3 experience when gaming, etc with some added space.

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  • http://www.johnpencola.com John Pencola

    Thanks!

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  • http://www.jpencola.com John Pencola

    @Linux Consultant:
    Thanks for the tip! :)