I’ve installed opensuse 11.1 on my ps3 today, and it runs extremely slow so that it’s not usable. We’re talking about half a minute to open a window! C’mon what makes opensuse perform so bad. I know ps3 has only 256 MB ram, but other distro’s seem to work much much smoother. There’s even an ubuntu guy who got compiz to work (although slowly) with xgl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR-xFScIArIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=(http://en.opensuse.org/PS3). I don’t expect to get fancy desktop effects, but it should be possible to listen to music, and browse the net without the slowdown.
openSUSE is a distro that is designed to give you a lot of apps and a lot of services and because of that it isn’t a good choice for slow machines or machines without much RAM. It just comes with too many apps and too many things turned on by default to be an ideal system for a ps3.
It runs unacceptably slowly for me on a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo box with 4G of RAM so it’s not surprising you are having trouble on your ps3.
I use openSUSE for very specialized tasks and for that it does well. I also think it’s one of the nicest kitchen-sink distros put out. For commercial users or windows-victims escaping to Linux it’s a great choice.
If you found other distros worked better for you than what’s stopping you from using them? Did you pay for your copy of openSUSE? Whining won’t help you.
If you want to use openSUSE on your ps3 because you like banging your head against the wall you can start by uninstalling tons of stuff and using xfce or even better fluxbox as your wm. Get rid of all the gnome daemons and prune your startup back to essential services.
Nevermind I gave up on linux on ps3. It simply doesn’t allow you to use any usefull apps. Movies can’t be played even with icewm or fluxbox. System runs extremely slow. Due to ppc kernel instead of i*86 flash is not supported. Plus ps3 forces to install linux on a 10 GB partition which is too small to put my movies and audio on, which was the reason why I want linux on my ps3. I looked for other distro’s, but those who could be usable like puppy linux or **** small linux don’t come with ppc kernels so you can’t install them.
In summary: It’s nice you can install linux on ps3, but there is really nothing you can do with it. Not until sony let linux use the GPU, which probably never will happen.
The slowness compared to 10.3 is probably a PPC thing. i386 can run reasonably well in 256 MiB, but it’s better to start with a minimal install and add to it. That means not taking defaults or installing from Live CD, and also configuring swap.
There probably is a way to play SD DVD and video files, on 256 MiB, as this used to work 8 years ago even with quite weak 450 Mhz processors.
> unacceptably slowly for me on a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo box with 4G of RAM
So you have driver or hardware issues. 11.1 x86_64 runs on my AMD X2 4 GiB box very well.
Bottom line is PS3 makes for a poor pc. It is an esoteric piece of hardware
designed to run games compiled into machine code. Thus it is going to have
issues running applications written in higher level languages and
interpreted code that are not optimized specifically to be run on the
platform. If you want to do other cool things with PS3 that don’t exist
you might as well post on the Sony forum and see if you can get your
desires addressed by Sony.
FWIW, I have a PS3 also, but I had already read that performance of other
OS’s are pure $#@! so I didn’t waste my time with it…plus I already have a
purpose built PC hooked up to my TV as well that handles my ‘other’ stuff.