I am planning to buy PS3 and install OpenSuSE on it. It would not be just for games, I see it more like media center.
Anyway, it would be my main machine besides Toshiba Satellite laptop. In general, I would use it for Internet, instant messaging, music, videos, sometimes office stuff, rarely gimp, inkcape and some c++ coding.
So I would like to know how good OpenSuSE acts on PS3? How good is performance? Some advantages and disadvantages of using Linux on PS3.
> I am planning to buy PS3 and install OpenSuSE on it. It would not be
> just for games, I see it more like media center.
So what is missing exactly from the base PS3 OS?
You can do picture slideshows, play movies surf the web, listen and organize
music… Personally I don’t see the need to muck up your PS3. Get one and
find out what it can do first.
If you have a pc with a vga-chip with 3D support in linux, you can play all of the free games in the game package…ok its not the same like PS3 but…its free!
> I know what PS3 can do. The thing is I wanted to know how general
> purpose OS behaves on PS3, that is why I wrote all the things I plan to
> do on it.
Everything I have read about running any other OS on the PS3 equates to lame
performance. The memory architecture of the PS3 is a very esoteric piece
of hardware and has shown poor performance as a general purpose computing
device. Just let the PS3 be a PS3, build yourself a SFF pc if you want a
media center device that does things the PS3 doesn’t…or post on Sony’s
forums your desires and maybe they will add the features to the base OS.
Hold on - did all these people reply to the thread, without even one of them having installed OpesSUSE on PS3.
Here a real life experience then. OpenSUSE 11.1 install fairly easy in PS3. Some intelligent guy made a driver that exposes the PS3 videomemory to be used under the hypervisor in some intelligent form - huge advantage from earlier versions. That means you can install and run a desktop (I installed KDE4.1 as on the DVD) and one progam with reasonable performance, if you open openoffice and firefox at the same time, and change program, you will suffer swapping bad performance. Find also the memory tuning hints written by a guy on IBM - even though he refers to fedora :-/
Right now I am going to rip KDE off (though I am a KDE fan) and try Xfce, and start getting Xfce 4.6 to work somehow. Speaking of performance - anyone wants to start encourageing OpenSUSE to be able to boot and run off a memory stick on PS3. If you run on a 16G memory stick, performance would be awesome no?
>>one progam with reasonable performance, if you open openoffice and firefox
>>at the same time, and change program, you will suffer swapping bad
>>performance.
You confirmed everything that was said.
The answer is yes it can be done, but for most uses, it’s just a waste of
time.
>>Speaking of performance - anyone wants to start encourageing OpenSUSE to
>>be able to boot and run off a memory stick on PS3. If you run on a 16G
>>memory stick, performance would be awesome no?
Again, if it runs badly when installed on the drive, what improvement is
there running off of USB? At last check the USB real world data transfer
rate is nowhere near that of SATA. So yes, booting from memory would in
theory be nice, it is still hamstrung via USB. While it’s a novel idea and
a little bit of technical fun, its real world use is bordering on
fiction…like booting Vista on a 386.
> And here’s a video on it ‘YouTube - OpenSuSE on PS3’
> (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35DlgNraYMg) It displays a full KDE4
> desktop. He even brought up openOffice.
I’ve seen this already. Analysis:
In 8 minutes it booted, opened a shell…closed a shell, opened OpenOffice,
closed open office and shutdown. It’s not meant to be a PC.
I’ve recently installed OpenSUSE 11.1 on my 160GB PS3 running F/W 2.70. I must say that I was very impressed that it went smoothly; sound, WiFi (WPA) worked in right after install. I had to customize the boot loader though to add the video option (video=ps3fb:mode:5 as per the instructions) to fully reach 1080p on my LCD/TV. As you have pointed out, running KDE4.1 is an overkill but once switched to IceWM, the performance is quite acceptable.
However, there is not a lot of packages built for ppc architecture and even OpenOffice is not included! This is not to mention other packages for multimedia applications such as mplayerplug-in for firefox. Also, the server(s) hosting ppc RPM are very unreliable causing connection disconnect painfully! Another issue (not just with OpenSuSE) is that the graphic driver doesn’t take advantage of 3D accel contributing to slowness of your display.
Sony handcuffed the graphic processor and utilized too small total RAM.
Absolutely incorrect. The slower performance on a PS3 is purely related to having too little RAM, leading to too many timeslices being devoted to swap functions.
OpenSUSE DOES make PS3 specific iso images of their releases, so one would think that folks touting themselves as experts would have brains enough to know when their opinions are obviously based on conjecture. Essentially, without 4 to 8 times the current RAM bank on the PS3, it cannot shine like it is actually truly capable of doing, so folks parse down their installations so that very little RAM, when in x gets taken up by the window mgr, or they use a bare bones window manager, so that what little RAM there is doesn’t get chewed up by the window manager. Were it not for practically incessant swap operations taking place on the PS3 due to low RAM, it would be faster than many PCs are. As it stands, it cannot compete as a ‘modern desktop PC’ since it cannot fit all the bells and whistles of a full, modern desktop into its sadly far smaller, but FAR FAR FASTER ARCHITECTURE RAM. If it could, it would put many functions performed by a modern PC to shame on a benchmark. It can churn protein folding calculations ten times faster than a PC, for example (already). Now, PCs are using GPU calculation engines and catching up, but the CELL BE CPU is king on certain things. So you shouldn’t put it down when you have no real experience with it.
> Were it not for practically incessant swap operations taking place on
> the PS3 due to low RAM, it would be faster than many PCs are.
I didn’t say the PS3 wasn’t a very good piece of engineering. It is. I own
one. I fully acknowledge its superior calculation abilities, but that
doesn’t make it a good general purpose computing device nor a good fit for
running OpenSuSE. It’s just a waste of effort since you have no way of
correcting the low RAM problem any work done will only be a workaround.
Doesn’t matter if there’s an ISO build for PS3 the applications are not
written with the low memory constraints of the PS3. What most people are
thinking when they post these questions about running OpenSuSE on PS3 are
asking is can I run some media center type stuff on my PS3 or can I make my
PS3 into a PC. To that I still say no, you are better served with
something else. It’s not going to behave like a PC…at all. Given the
short lives of consoles, I still think coding for the platform is a waste
of time.
Nice, sensible reply (I found my old account).
Not a deliberate chameleon.
I suppose you are right. They can’t even make an optical reader that lasts much more than a year, and that is truly sad, and perhaps even illegal. My first LaserDisc player lasted 18 years.
What hardware is in the PS3?
